To the Wolves
by shooting-stetsons
Summary: SEQUEL TO "TWO WEEKS" AND "LION-HEARTED GIRL." Natasha Romanov has vanished on a self-assigned suicide mission, to end the Red Room before the old demons can take away everything she loves. With the Avengers scattered, will a ramshackle team of junior SHIELD agents led by Agent X be enough to help her complete her mission, or will she make it home in pieces?
1. Chapter 1

**Story is INCOMPLETE as of yet so updates will only be once a week. Also Katerina's birthday is April 24th, for anyone who cares.**

* * *

"Sir?"

Nick Fury looked up from the detritus of his recent meeting to catch Agent Hill's eyes watching him from the door. "What is it?" he asked, putting down his pen.

Stepping further into the office, Hill stopped exactly one respectful step away from the desk with both hands clasped in front of her. "Sir, I know that Agent Romanov is still technically on leave pending investigation, but there's something you should know." At his continuing attention, she went on. "She went missing, sir. Early this morning Stark's security system spotted her leaving the tower with a packed bag. A few CCTV spots caught her approaching LaGuardia Airport. This could have something to do with the investigation, sir."

"Do _you_ think it does, Agent Hill?" asked Fury. His fingers interlaced as he watched her for a visible reaction. There was none, of course. Fury had trained her himself.

After a moment of thought she shook her head. "I can't make any conclusions as yet, sir. Apparently there was some talk after the initial incident about the Red Guardian, the Department's first answer to the super soldier program. Alexei Shoskatov. A failure, of course. They put him on ice after the first phases of conditioning, when they found Barnes a more promising candidate. You remember Barnes reported his body missing from the mill wreckage in his debriefing."

"I recall."

"Well, Shoskatov and Romanov have a history," continued Hill. "I spoke to Barnes after Stark called her in missing. He says that Shoskatov was used by the Department's Red Room program to draw out Romanov's vulnerabilities back in the forties. She was fifteen and in love with him, sir. They were married in secret and Shoskatov's death was staged by the Room when Romanov was...she was four months pregnant, sir."

One of Fury's eyebrows rose slightly. "Pregnant," he echoed.

Hill nodded, unmoved. "Yes, sir. The baby was stillborn in early 1945. Explains a lot about her behavior four years ago, don't you think?"

With the press of a few buttons a holographic projection of Romanov's medical file flickered to life above Fury's desk. His uncovered eye roved over it and he sighed. A miscarriage. He'd wondered why she wasn't on her game, but just pinned it on Coulson going down, he hadn't thought to look in medical. "I think I know who to call," he concluded. "Agent Romanov is not currently an active member of SHIELD, but she still knows SHIELD secrets. We need to get her back before the Russians dig into her head again. Send a search team out after her. Do not engage, just find her."

"Sir."

As soon as Hill turned on her heel and left, Fury was on the phone. With one hand he held the receiver, and with the other entered a long string of code into the system, moving through phone services and proxies on four different continents before finally getting it to ring. As practiced, the man on the other end waited five rings before picking up. "This had better be good."

In the last 52 months, Fury had only called this line once before. "We need you to come in," he said without preamble.

"You want me to step away? _Now?_"

"You've done enough for now. Romanov has been compromised and you're the only man for the job."

There was a long pause. "You don't think she can handle herself. We _are_ talking about the same woman, right?" he asked.

Leaning forward on his elbows, Fury rolled his eye at the ceiling and prayed for patience. "A lot of things have changed since you were last around. Romanov doesn't have the same edge she used to. The Russian super serum - that she very conveniently didn't tell anyone she'd been dosed with until about three years ago - has been reversed. Even if she's more than capable of handling herself, sniper bullets are still pretty damn effective. Not to mention she's just had a baby."

"What? _Romanov_, a mother? With whom?"

"Who do you think, besides Barton?"

"Well, when you last contacted me she had the Winter Soldier climbing up her ass, so I thought it would be prudent to ask. Natasha always did like a difficult case."

Had Fury been a more lighthearted man he might have smiled. "Well, Barton's about the same, if you recall, and there really isn't a case more difficult than Romanov," he cryptically said.

His contact's voice was lenient and highly amused. "You have a good point. But sir...do you know what they say about girls and wolves? In the stories about wolves and girls. Girls in red. All alone in the woods. About to get eaten up."*

"Wolves and girls," Fury mused. "What do they say about them?"

Even as he asked it, he knew where his friend was going. They both remembered as clear as anything, the day Agent Barton was assigned to take down the deadly Black Widow but instead carried her in, ninety pounds, sick with pneumonia, an arrow hole in her shoulder, but still trying her damnedest to kick and bite her way free. Even as Barton took her up to medical, assured her she was in safe hands with a look of steely determination on his face, she fought. He wasn't about to let this one slip away, and she wasn't about to go down without a fight.

"Both have sharp teeth."

* * *

Clint was awoken by a soft slap to the face; he flailed to consciousness, eyes flying open, and next thing he knew the barrel of the gun he kept stashed under his pillow was pressed between Tony's eyes. The billionaire's hands flew defensively up. Once the initial panic wore off Clint dropped the handgun back to the mattress, pulling his hearing aids from the bedside table.

"What happened?" he asked hoarsely. When he turned to the side of the bed where Natasha slept and found it empty, he whipped back around to Tony. "Is the baby okay? What happened to Katie?"

Tony's hands pressed on his shoulder to keep him from leaping right at the ceiling. "Katie's fine, Barton. It's Natasha. She's gone," he said, anxiously licking his lips. Clint finally realized that it was early, too early for Tony to have been asleep. "JARVIS rose the alarm but she got out of the city fast. I've already called SHIELD in on it."

"Wh-?" He leaped from the bed and ran, staggering a little, to the nursery, not processing anything near fast enough, not daring believe Tony until he saw with his own eyes-

Kate was fast asleep in her cradle, her arms stretched above her head and tiny rosebud mouth absently suckling as she dreamed of the only certainty she knew: eating. The air still smelled faintly of milk gone sour, and the fleece Natasha used to cover Kate while she nursed with the lights on was in the laundry basket, instead of slung over the rocking chair. There was a dried stain of breast milk on its corner from where the smell came.

"Told you she's fine," Tony said behind him, and he sagged with relief. "It's Natasha we should be focusing on. Sharon knew you were worried about her. She expressed this concern to Pepper, and Pepper asked JARVIS to keep an eye out for any unusual behavior. And, well, she skipped out of here about two hours ago and CCTV caught her on her way to LaGuardia, so I'd consider that pretty unusual."

It took everything Clint had in him not to start yelling before leaving the baby's room. Instead he grabbed Tony by the shoulder, dragged him out into the hall, and shoved him to the wall. "She left two hours ago and you decide to tell me now?" he hissed furiously.

"It was JARVIS's directive, not me," Tony replied, hands going up again. "He couldn't exactly raise the alarm every time Natasha went out for a diaper run, could he? So it was set into his coding that if she was gone for longer than an hour he would hack into CCTV and scan for her image profile, which, yeah, takes at least an hour to sort through, even with AI like mine. Do you have any idea how many security cameras there are in this neighborhood alone? By the time JARVIS found a matching profile - which is only 82% accurate, by the way - she was probably already getting on a plane. She could be on her way anywhere by now."

"Can't you figure out where?" asked Clint, more than a little frantic. "Can't JARVIS-?"

"Hack into the mainframe of the nation's largest international airport, in the very city that was victim to the worst terrorist attack the United States has ever seen?" retorted Tony, rolling his eyes. "Even _I'm_ not_ that_ good, Barton. Come on, dude, lay off a little. I think she left a note."

After a few long, tense moments, Clint released him. He made a show of rubbing his poor tortured arms before clapping Clint on the shoulder. They padded into the kitchen, and Clint found the note left on the counter. He had to glare at Tony to keep him reading over his shoulder.

_C,_  
_I don't want to leave, but I can't sleep knowing that Alexei is out there. As long as he is alive you are still in danger. Katya is in danger and I'm the one he wants. If I can successfully draw him out and kill him, I will. But if my death is the only thing that will ensure my family's continuing safety, then I won't hesitate. I'll try to come home. Take care of Katya. Don't look for me. _

_I love you._  
_-N_

It was basically up to par with her usual frank eloquence, she hated wasting words, but her handwriting was shaky. Natasha's hand never shook if she could help it. Even seven years ago, when she'd had to write her own ransom note with a gun to one temple, her handwriting was perfectly steady.

In the other room, the baby woke up and started making soft sounds. Clint's heart sprang up into his throat. "She's a month old," he choked out, uncertain if he was more terrified, despairing, or furious. "The baby's only a month old _yesterday_, and Natasha _left her_."

Tony's hand closed on his shoulder. "Left her in pretty good hands, though," he said, bluntly reassuring. "Come on, it's Natasha. She knows what she's doing; she wouldn't leave that baby with anyone but the very best."

Scowling anxiously, Clint shuffled back to the nursery and picked Kate up to soothe her soft sounds. "It's okay, Katie-Kate," he murmured as her tiny arms flailed, instantly feeling out of his depth without Natasha there. "Mama's gonna be home real soon." His voice didn't shake; he really believed it. He returned to the kitchen with Kate resting against his shoulder. She started to whimper and cry, and Tony gave him a disparaging look.

"Barton, why are you holding your baby like a bomb? It's been a month, I thought you'd be over that by now," he incredulously said, then held out his arms. "Gimme."

"What? No, I can do it!" protested Clint, jutting his other shoulder between Kate and Tony's prying hands. "I just haven't had a lot of practice; Nat never really let me do this stuff before, she always did it herself."

Tony put a hand on his shoulder, turning him back. "Just let me do it once so you can see," he demanded, almost like a kid trying to play his friend's game. "Come on, don't be a baby hog, gimme gimme gimme!" He waggled his fingers until Clint reluctantly passed her over, and almost instantly the tightness of his personality drained away until he was cradling Kate to the warmth of his arc reactor like an old pro.

Then again, he had almost two years of experience with Maria by then. "Now, let's see what the problem is!" he went on in a definite Daddy Voice as soon as Kate had calmed down some. He picked her up, gingerly sniffed her bottom, thought it over, then made a passive face and announced, "No, she's not wet yet. Probably a gas bubble or something, huh, Sugar Pants? Y'little chunk monkey...go get a towel, Barton, I think she might-"

She erped all over his shoulder. "That's my girl!" crowed Clint, laughing even as he hurried to get the fleece from the nursery.

"That's okay," Tony was assuring the infant, rubbing her back and gently bouncing her with a wrinkled nose. "I betcha feel better now, huh? I bet you do." His voice was so uncharacteristically soft compared to his usual snark that Clint thought to ask if he'd made any progress on the Life Model Decoys he'd been working on, smiling as he supported Kate's wobbly head in one hand. Clint cleaned the spit-up from his shoulder then took the baby back with Tony hovering over him. "Okay, just put one hand there, make sure you've got her head, but don't bend her too far forward either...no, dude, let her wiggle around, she's getting comfortable, she knows what she's doing...there, see?"

Grinning down at Kate like every bit the proud uncle he was, Tony clapped him on the back. "Well, you're not natural, but you'll get it. I mean I did, right? Man. I miss this. Like, don't get me wrong, Maria's perfect and wins all the awards in my book, but now she's up walking and talking, asking questions, pitching fits because her mind's so far ahead of her mouth; everything's so much simpler when they're bitty like this. Enjoy it while you can." There was a weird look on Tony's face as he regarded them, like there was something in his mind stretched too thin and on the verge of breaking.

"Do you think she's gonna come home?" Clint asked suddenly, testing the waters.

The thing behind Tony's face broke, but he didn't outwardly react. "'Course she will," he snorted. "Give her two days, tops, and she'll be back, covered in Commie blood."

Clint smiled when Kate's fingers caught around one of his pajama buttons. "Just the way we like her, isn't that right?" he asked her stern wrinkled face. She blinked her blue eyes open and looked up at him. There was so much trust in that look, he needed a second to catch his breath as fear overtook him. Fear of disappointing her, fear of losing her, and most of all, fear of having to explain to his little girl, when she was old enough to ask such questions, why she didn't have a mom like all the other kids at school.

Another clap on his shoulder. "Okay, well, looks like you've got this covered. I'm going back to the penthouse. Someone from the brass should be here soon. Keep it together until then; there's nothing we can do until we figure out where she's going. JARVIS is looking up departing flights from LaGuardia now. Bad news: it's Memorial Weekend; there are flights coming and going from damn near everywhere. Good news: Most flights were booked up, but we'll be able to see if any had openings left that were snatched at the last minute and it could narrow down the search. Come on down to the communal floor and we'll all wait for news."

He couldn't argue with that. With Katie-Kate cradled to his chest he followed Tony downstairs.

* * *

She was sitting in Heathrow airport, waiting for a connecting flight, when her milk came in again. Natasha bit her lip and subtly adjusted her shirt, only halfway annoyed with the physical inconvenience. The other half ached for home, which only made her angrier with herself. Since when had she become so weak? When had her lion heart gone soft? To pass the time until the connection she pulled out her phone - 18 missed calls from everyone on the team and Sharon - and glanced over some pictures Peter had sent her a few weeks after Katya was born. She'd grown so much in just a month; how much would she miss by the time she made it home? If she made it home at all.

"You ought to call," a man said to her left.

She glared at him. "Excuse you?"

The man was looking levelly back at her. "You're sitting like there's something up your arse, you keep checking your watch, staring at photographs of a baby that I can only presume is yours because every few moments you adjust your shirt like it's making you uncomfortable, but it's recently been stretched more than usual over your breasts because they're swollen-not that I'm looking, mind. It's your first time away from the new baby for longer than a few hours. In London on business, are you? Anxiety is natural, and there's no shame in calling to check on things at home," he rattled off, then smirked.

Natasha didn't allow herself to outwardly react. "So, what, am I supposed to be impressed?" she asked archly.

"You could be."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, forgive me if I pass. I have a flight to catch."

When she moved to get up his hand lashed out and gripped her wrist. It took all of her self control not to break that hand and flee. "Don't go that way," the man said, no longer smirking and poised on the edge of his seat, "they're waiting for you."

It was like a bucket of ice water had been poured down her throat into her stomach. "How do you know that?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper.

"I do now," replied the man with another smirk, this one sharp as a blade. "This way, quickly."

"But my flight-"

"You'll have to catch another."

Heedless of everything she had been trained to believe, she followed the man when he swept away. They walked briskly but didn't run, didn't make spectacles of themselves, only acted like they needed to hurry to catch their plane. Natasha was exhausted and her breasts were aching but she pushed it back, pushed it deep into a place where she could function cleanly and deal with it all later, grounding herself on the feeling of the bag bouncing against the small of her back.

"Who are you?" she asked, their shoulders brushing.

The man snorted. "The enemy of my enemy's enemy is, I believe, an even better friend than most, but I won't be telling you anything, thank you, I'm in a hurry and my assistant is late," he said. Despite the warmth of the day he was wearing a scarf, and he flicked its end at her.

Natasha narrowed her eyes. "And who's your enemy?"

"Rather defeats the purpose of not telling you anything if I tell you _everything_, now, is it, Miss Romanova?"

Whipping her head around to look at the mouse-faced man in the red scarf and tacky t-shirt, Natasha hardened her expression and made a show of grasping his hand like a loving wife so she could dig her fingernails into his flesh, right above a vital artery. "How do you know my name?" she growled. "Don't think I couldn't kill you with a fingernail."

"Oh, I don't doubt it," replied the man, just as casual as moments before. "I know your name because I, too, live in New York. And because you're known around the world with the rest of your costumed pals, though you seem to have forgotten that little tidbit. Turn left here."

She turned, and somehow or another they slipped unobserved into the line for another plane. The man swapped out her ticket for his, shook her limp hand, and vanished without another word. Perplexed, a little breathless, Natasha followed the line and allowed them to shuffle her onto a plane bound for Berlin just as a pretty, dark-haired woman hurried to her apparent new friend's side and started lecturing him.

Before she was ushered through the breezeway doors she glanced back, met the man's eye. He made a telephone gesture with his hand and mouthed, _Call them_. Then he was gone, for real this time, leaving Natasha even more puzzled than before. She glanced down at the phone still clutched in her hand and marveled that it only took eight hours from home to turn everything on its head. Still, missions had gone further awry in less time before. She could handle this.

She could.

* * *

***=this set of dialogue is HEAVILY based off of a quote from Black Widow: The Name of the Rose**


	2. Chapter 2

They called him Agent X, for lack of a better name. His team comprised only of the most promising junior agents with less than two years of experience. No one knew why and no one dared ask. He wore sunglasses indoors, dark suits, and a black baseball cap. Rumor was that this agent had been around way back before Hawkeye joined up. He had a clearance level so high he couldn't even _tell them_, and yet no one above level 2 was allowed near the assignment to track down Agent Romanov.

"He's like a paradox," Agent Morris mused one day while she and the other junior agents watched X on the firing range, "wrapped in an enigma."

Agent Sterling sauntered up behind her and pushed her hat off her head, laughing when she nearly fell over catching it. "Wrapped in a taco and a bag of cats?" he teased, and she made a rude face.

"Now you're just being ridiculous."

They rolled their eyes at each other and the other juniors fought not to laugh at them. Some people (mostly the ones with a death-wish) tried to call them the new Barton and Romanov. They usually only said it once. No one knew the full extent of Barton and Romanov's relationship, of course, but everyone had their theories. Romanov had been on leave for almost eight months before Barton ran off the job like a bat out of hell, and he'd been on leave ever since then; the conclusion wasn't hard to reach, even if they were both the very picture of professionalism on base.

X finished shooting his clip and brought the target in to inspect. The juniors gave a collective groan - both of envy and because they'd been gambling on the end result. "I'm a little rusty," he remarked, regarding a few stray bullet holes. They were perhaps an inch away from the "hot spots" that had been completely blown out.

"Yeah, man, you're really off your game," someone in the back cajoled while money passed hands.

Shooting them a look from under his hat, X gave an odd little smile, and despite the fact that they couldn't see his eyes they all clammed up. "Lesson one: Gambling is disallowed on base. Make your bets more discreetly or I'll be confiscating them." Another collective groan. "I'm looking to put a team together for a confidential job. Everyone take up a station and start shooting as normal."

They fell into practice, and one by one X walked down the row, occasionally reaching out and tapping a shoulder. Morris tried to stand a little taller when he passed her station, but slumped with disappointment when neither she nor Sterling were tagged.

The overhead buzzer ended the session after twenty minutes or so. "Those of you that I tagged, continue with your day as usual. The rest follow me." Morris and Sterling exchanged passive faces - but widened their eyes slightly - as they joined the half of the group trailing after X. After the range came the gym, pairing up and sparring while he watched. Once in a while he would step in, give advice, correct someone's stance, and sometimes even step in when a pair was having trouble.

After an hour, X called them to stop and Morris dropped to sit on the mats, panting. Sterling was her best friend and a functional moron most days, but the guy certainly knew how to fight. They met eyes and grinned, knowing they had done pretty well compared to their battered and bruised teammates. At X's command they fell in to line. He ordered them to stand and wait for him, then left and didn't come back for ninety minutes. Two agents gave up and left even though it was clearly a test. Morris' feet started to ache but it was her own fault, she had worn the worst possible work shoes today, and she made herself persevere if only as a sort of self punishment. No one dared speak in case X was watching.

Finally he returned, nodding, pleased. "I wanted to leave you for longer, but we're running short on time," he said and walked down the row. "As I said before on the range, I'm putting together a team. You six have shown the most promise of your level, but there's going to be a lot of waiting around. That's what the last test was for. Some of you have never been on an official mission, and that's good, because this isn't going to be like any mission you've ever trained for. This is not a search and destroy job, or even reconnaissance. It's search and _assist_.

"Agent Romanov was seen leaving the country this morning, only a few hours ago," he continued down the line, head bowed. "Normally that wouldn't bother us; she's a free woman to do as she pleases while on leave. However...her husband, Agent Barton, is-"

"Oh, I _knew_ it!" Agent Morgan blurted out at the end of the line.

Even though the room had previously been silent, this was a whole new brand of quiet, an uncomfortable weight sitting on all of their heads while X turned to look at the junior agent and she realized her mistake. Morris would have met Sterling's eye with an uncomfortable grimace if she weren't so terrified. X slowly walked down to the end of the line where Morgan stood, until they were face to face.

He smiled. On a normal man it would have looked sweet, but knowing (or rather not knowing) who he was made it look dangerous as a blade. "You knew it all along, didn't you?" he asked with false levity.

They could practically hear Morgan shaking in her boots. "I-I-I didn't mean any disrespect, sir," she stammered, "besides, we-we _all_ knew it!"

Every agent in the line internally winced. Morgan was always 'speaking for them' when really all they wanted her to do was shut her big mouth. X seemed to recognize it even though none of the other juniors let their mortification show on their faces. He nodded to himself before looking back at Morgan. "Well, since you're so proud of yourself, I think you've earned some well-deserved rest, Agent Moran."

"It-it's _Morgan_, sir," she said, voice thick with tears.

X nodded. "I know. Off you go, now." When she was halfway to the door he called after her, "And, Agent?"

She turned, hopeful.

"The information you just heard is _classified_," he said. "Relationships between agents in an organization such as this one are forbidden unless you know, with one hundred percent certainty, that a messy break up won't lead to an international incident. Agents Romanov and Barton knew what they were getting into when they made their choice, knew the risks, and acted in the face of them because they knew they were in it for good. That information doesn't leave this room. If word gets out that Agents Romanov and Barton are married then I'll know exactly where it came from. Don't think I'll hesitate to alert your superior officer."

Nodding tearfully, Morgan sniffed, "Yes, sir," and rushed out.

Yep, X was officially Morris' hero.

Once the bang of the door closing faded, X turned back to address them. "You five have shown the most promise of your level," he amended with a smirk. "Unless anyone else has something to say about Agent Romanov's personal life, I'll continue." Of course no one said a word; they had _some_ sense of self-preservation. "Good. As I was saying:

"The Red Room. Ever heard of it?" X asked to silence. "I didn't think so. A Russian sleeper cell formed after the Czar fell, to create the ultimate spy force. Beginning from the end of Imperial Russia in 1917, they began abducting children - primarily girls - and conducting dangerous medical experiments on them. It was the foundation work of what would someday become the super serum, though they would never achieve the same affect of Doctor Erskine's formula.

"Natasha Romanov - then Natalia Romanova - was one of those girls. Orphaned as an infant, she was practically raised within the walls of the agency. Her promise was unthinkable, her skill set profound. By the time she was ten she knew as many ways to kill a man, a master of deception and playing decoy while older agents worked behind the scenes. These people brainwashed her, manipulated her mentally and physically, stripped away any chance of innocence she might have had; it's a miracle she had the presence of mind to defect after so many decades under their control.

"It was believed that the Red Room was destroyed in an explosion in the late 1970s, but at least five survived. Agent Romanov, the Winter Soldier, and a man named the Red Guardian were in cryogenic chambers that mostly sheltered them from the blast. The brain stem of Ivan Petrovitch - Romanov's guardian - was harvested from his body by an unknown survivor and later built into a mechanical replica. Agent Romanov escaped the site and became a free agent; the Winter Soldier stowed the Red Guardian away and began to rebuild the Room's forces with the help of the unknown survivor. They have been quietly building up their reserves ever since, with the exceptions of the attack that led to Winter Soldier's capture, and, more recently, Agent Barton's abduction last year."

A silent ripple passed through the five junior agents. They had all been around long enough to know Barton vanished after a routine Avengers mission and returned eight weeks later with burn scars around his ears. Some of them had even been on-base when Romanov faked her defection to save him, yet none of them had the clearance to understand _why_ she'd been driven to such extremes.

"There's still a small sleeper cell independent of the Russian government in operation, despite Petrovitch's death," X went on, starting to look bored with his own monologue, "the Red Guardian among them. It has become clear that they intend to pursue Agent Romanov until she's rejoined to their ranks or dead. It is also clear that the Red Room has a long history of blatant disregard for human life. They've already used her husband as collateral, they will not hesitate from using her daughter, who was born last month, and Agent Romanov has made the executive decision to stop them before that can happen.

"As skilled as she is, and as scattered as the Room's resources may be, this is not a job for one person, let alone one who has fallen victim to that elite force's mind tricks in the past or has just had a baby. That's where we come in. Agent Romanov will be doing a lot of the work - probably already has done by now; she isn't one to fly blind - so all we need to do is find her and assist in taking the Room down. SHIELD has no interest in taking prisoners. I would have preferred more of you, but these numbers are still very good, very impressive. Yes, Agent Morris?"

Sterling twitched beside her, but she couldn't help asking. "Sir, why did you choose the most inexperienced agents possible for something so important?"

X moved down the line to look at her face-to-face, and she was convinced she was about to be thrown out like Morgan. "You have to start somewhere," X smiled instead, and stepped away. It was far from the truth, they all could see that, but at least she was still on the team. "Go take a break; we leave at nightfall." Even with his dismissal they didn't dare break rank until he moved first.

* * *

"Em, I thought you were gonna shit yourself!" Sterling cackled in the cafeteria later.

She threw a hot dog bun at his face. "Shut _up_, Erik!" she scowled before burying her face in her arms. "God, I think I saw my whole life flash before my eyes! I thought he was gonna pull down those shades and go all Cyclops on my-!"

Agent Sitwell shot her a Look from a few tables away and she clammed up. Right. The Mutant thing was kind of a hot-button issue with the Registration Act still rolling around Congress. She mouthed an apology before glaring daggers at her best friend.

"Open your mouth and this hot dog goes up your nose," she threatened.

Sterling just grinned.

* * *

"Clint, will you please sit down for two minutes? You're making me dizzy just to watch," Bruce pleaded from the sofa.

Pacing around the room with Kate wailing in his arms, Clint glared. "She's _crying,_" he needlessly pointed out.

"Yeah, well, you've been holding her for the past four hours," retorted Bruce. "Put her down for a while; she can probably feel how tense you are."

So Clint put her down, reluctantly, anxiously, like she might explode at any moment, on the sofa between him and Bruce. Her face scrunched up for a few moments before she slumped and relaxed. Opened her glossy blue eyes and looked around at them. Rubbed her coppery hair against the mattress until it all tufted up.

"She has a teeny mohawk," Bruce smiled down at her.

"Yeah...it won't stay down," murmured Clint, brushing a hand over her hair only for it to all tuft up again. "Natasha would try to...try to wet it down, but it's so light when it dries..." He suddenly sighed explosively and rubbed a hand over his forehead. "She's a month old. She's only a month old and Natasha _left her_."

Leaning over Kate, Bruce grinned and waggled fingers at her face, then tickled her until she made a startled cooing sound, kicking her feet. "Natasha will be back," he firmly said, not even tearing his gaze away from the baby's wide eyes. "She will take care of whatever she needs taken care of and then she will come back." His voice was full of confidence, even pride, like an older brother doting on his little sister.

And he _had_ treated her like a little sister through everything, had taken care of her while Clint was in the hospital, sat with her through nightmares that were too intense even for Clint to soothe, helped cure her of the Russian super serum and guided her through alternative options on the chance that she couldn't become pregnant. It was impossibly hard on her, surrendering her body to the needs and demands of another, giving away pieces of herself, changing herself to accommodate the new baby, doing all of the things she swore she never would again for the sake of their daughter. Compromising.

Bruce had been there with them through all of it, Clint's best friend and Natasha's anchor, better than any brother they had or might have had and a support beam to lean on when things got scary. And that's why he was Kate's godfather now; Clint knew that when something inevitably happened to take one or both of them away before their time, Bruce would be able to take her under his wing and raise her well.

"Stop being so maudlin," Bruce chided him, using his higher-pitched Papa Voice as he continued tickling Kate.

Clint frowned. "I didn't even say anything."

Looking up at him with eyebrows raised, Bruce smiled, "You didn't have to. It's rolling off of you. Everything's going to be fine; focus on that and focus on Kate. You don't have time to mindlessly brood anymore, you're a dad now and have your kid to consider."

He took a deep breath at that, his brow furrowing as he regarded his infant daughter swinging her fists on the sofa cushions. "I just don't know if I'm good enough to be _her_ dad," he admitted quietly. "She's so perfect and I'm so..._not_."

Bruce rolled his eyes up at the ceiling and silently prayed for patience. "It doesn't matter what you are. It's what you raise her to be," he sternly said, and got up when his phone started ringing.

Kate seemed to eye him with suspicion when Bruce wasn't there to tickle her. "I know the feeling, kiddo," he commiserated with the infant.

"...Alright, I'll pass it on. Thank you." Bruce closed the phone and strode back just as quickly as he had gotten up. "That was SHIELD. Or, well, Tony relaying for SHIELD. They've got a team going after Natasha tonight. Some elite agent ranked so high they couldn't even tell his name and a couple of juniors. She's in good hands, Clint," he said and sat again.

Carefully, watching how Kate's eyelids had started drooping, Clint turned her head with both hands, like Bruce had taught him so the back of her head wouldn't go flat. He stroked a few little wisps of hair from her face and felt his throat clog with just how much he loved his daughter. When he looked up again Bruce was smiling at him.

"You're going to be just fine," he said.

* * *

They strapped her into an army plane and roared over the Siberian wilderness. In her pack was half a canteen of water, a knife, and a book with only three matches. The propeller wailed so loudly that she couldn't hear herself think, clutching the safety strap in both hands to keep them from shaking. Everything was going to be fine. She had been trained all her life for this.

After countless false-turns and misdirections, she and the others were unceremoniously dropped. The parachute could and would be used as a blanket, a tent, a bag, anything. Silk the Union couldn't afford for anything but war, strong lines, she drifted like an angel. Or fell like a demon. For a few moments, she allowed herself to enjoy the freedom of sensation, but then she focused on manipulating the parachute to land away from the others.

On the first day, she found a little unfrozen stream and filled her canteen.

On the eighth day, she managed to kill a fox instead of rabbits and rats. She didn't dare start a fire, though, because the others were close and would kill to survive. Instead she buried the carcass in snow and waited.

On the tenth day, three of the others were dead and she knew that she would be next. She dug up the remains of her supper the night before and hiked to the nearby hills. If the map they had given her (a set of dots marking villages on a blank piece of dirty newspaper) was correct, which was impossible to know, then there could be a town that way. Her hands were frostbitten and painful, knife dull, but she still had two matches left.

She thought she saw a boy once, a shadow of him skipping between the trees like a ghost, but when she blinked he was gone. Somewhere far away, a wolf howled.

Of the eight of them, only two survived: she and Yelena. Yelena killed three, she two in self defense. They made it to the same hillside village within minutes of each other, gasping and running and throwing rocks and knives. Yelena tangled fingers in her long red hair and pulled with all her might; she kicked her in the stomach until freed, then bit her for good measure, and was the first. Yelena cried like a baby until Nikolai shut her up with a slap. She was given a small piece of chocolate for being the first.

The year was 1940, the whole world was burning, and Natalia was twelve winters old.


	3. Chapter 3

2004

Just over a year after she'd been taken in to SHIELD's custody, Coulson—only a senior agent and Barton's handler to her at the time—stopped by her quarters and asked, "Are you happy here, Agent Romanov?"

Natasha met his eye and couldn't be certain if he was mocking her or not. She went back to cleaning her gun and shrugged. "I suppose there is more stability here than in the free agent business," she noncommittally replied.

He called her on it right away, of course.

"That isn't a yes."

Stilling her hands around the barrel of her favored handgun, Natasha looked up again after a long time. "Nothing about my life has changed aside from my allegiance," she admitted. "I still owe your people my life, my mind, everything, and it...reflects. I can't roam base or the Helicarrier freely without being looked at like I'm up to something. My superiors and handlers use my debts against me. I know I could report them but—and this is not a formal meeting, I assume, or you would be taking notes. Barton must have asked you to come."

"He noticed you haven't been yourself lately," Coulson said without even a hint of remorse or embarrassment for selling Barton out.

She scoffed. "How could that idiot possibly know if I'm acting out of character?" she asked. The addition of _when I don't even know myself?_ was unspoken, yet heard, by the both of them.

Natasha set the gun and oil aside and shifted on her cot, knees curled, and regarded the handler. "I'm a nesting doll," she explained. "Except the Red Room, they took out all the smaller dolls inside of me, the ones I was born with, and put something else in their place. Something that better fit their needs. I was promised a new life when I defected, the chance to be my own person instead of someone else's puppet, but instead I'm doing exactly what I used to with a different patch on my shoulder. You people didn't give me the humanity I was promised; you just filled me with a cheap imitation.

"My body is not my own so long as there is a need requiring my skill set to be fulfilled," she said, a snarl in her voice. "The agents in charge of me may as well rape me on the daily, they tear me apart and stuff someone else in the holes they leave, then send me on my way, another disguise, another assassination, another orphaned child, and for what? So their hands are clean and they continue on as the 'good guys'? Where does that leave me, then?"

By the time she finished her chin was resting atop her knees and her mouth mumbling with disdain. Coulson continued to watch her with a level eye from the door. After he had made certain she was finished he pushed off from the frame and nodded.

The next morning the agents in charge of handling Natasha were gone from the organization—for mistreating their charge—and she was partnered with Barton and Coulson.

Their first assignment as a team came in and she expected the same routine as before: assume an identity, retrieve the information, kill all witnesses, and be home by morning. But instead Coulson walked her through every possibility for extracting the data and every way out of the building. No one had to die unless they attacked her, and in that case Barton would be watching through his scope.

"Why did you do that?" she asked Coulson after the briefing, uncertain of what to feel and so settling on anger. "You didn't have to, I-I wasn't _asking_ you to-"

Coulson put up a hand to silence her. "Did you ever consider that they took the bigger dolls, and left the smallest one?" he asked, voice awash with mild curiosity. "The deepest one down? And then just replaced the outer dolls with the things you don't recognize?"

She crossed her arms. "Why would you say that?" she archly replied.

"Because someone with artificial insides wouldn't care about being called the 'bad guy,'" Coulson said, and waved her out.

Hands clenched, Natasha returned to the agents' quarters with her heart thudding between her eyes.

* * *

2015

Natasha woke in Berlin hours later, disoriented and irritable, with two stains on the front of her shirt. A well-meaning man sitting beside her silently offered her a spare from his own carry-on bag, but she was so taken aback that she rudely brushed him off. Before anyone (else) could notice she quickly closed her jacket and internally grumbled all the way off the plane.

A flash of her badge at customs was enough to carry her through security without her bags being checked any further; even if it hadn't, she used a special Stark Industries chamber in her gun to make it appear unloaded.

Natasha had always liked former East Berlin more than the West, all its clean lines and angles and tiny apartments perfectly suited for one, though of course she knew that as a member of an American organization she was supposed to be morally opposed to what those clean lines and angles and tiny apartments perfectly suited for one represented. Those clean lines and angles were made to discourage straying from uniformity with one's comrades. Those tiny apartments were perfectly suited for one but had housed entire families in their heyday. She was no longer supposed to think of herself as a solitary unit, but as a fraction of a larger whole. One third of her family. One one-hundredth of SHIELD. One twelfth of the Black Widow program inflated to one half inflated to one.

What a joke, that the only time she'd been a whole person in her life had been when she felt the very smallest of all, reduced to a trunk of swanky clothes and the knife in her belt. She'd lost the clothes in the end after a job gone wrong in Budapest, had to walk to her last assignments as a free agent in the pouring rain, started dropping pounds like victims, felt the fluid start to build in her lungs despite the serum coursing like armor through her veins.

Then had come Barton, that idiot assassin who refused to kill her no matter how much she goaded him. Natasha hadn't even known why she'd been goading him at the time, but he had. Oh, he had known. The greatest marksman in the world missed the shot of a lifetime because of a gut feeling. She could have killed him for that call.

Berlin was nothing like Budapest.

About twenty minutes of determinedly aimless walking into the city, Natasha noticed that she was being followed. It wasn't hard to notice, considering that that man following her was a seven-foot-tall assassin who went by Golem; they'd worked together once before, but he didn't look in the mood for a friendly reunion.

«I thought you only did freelance work?» she asked in French. Neither of them came from France, but the other didn't have to know that little detail.

Lumbering footsteps thudded nearer until they were level. It was late at night and dark, otherwise the Golem never would have been out in the open. His height attracted too much attention. «I do,» he replied. «But the money offered was too good. Custom-made shoes in my size don't pay for themselves, you understand.»

She replied, «Oh, of course,» with a roll of her eyes. «And I hope that you understand the moment you move with intent I will put a bullet in your skull.»

The Golem laughed, low and deep in his throat. «You are much the same as I remember you, Widow. Ruthless to a fault. Though...some things have changed, haven't they?» A grin curled his lip.

«Yes, I suppose they have,» she growled, keeping her eyes forward. «But they have only served to make me stronger.»

«And here I thought that black widows devoured their young.»

Natasha took a deep breath, but otherwise didn't let the rage boiling under her skin come to surface. «Don't you know I'm the exception to the rule?» she scoffed.

«Is it true you ate your first after it died?»

He was trying to get a reaction out of her. Natasha gritted her teeth and continued to walk with determination. There was a train station around here somewhere, if memory served, she only had to find it. «It was born dead,» she deadpanned. «And I ate my ex husbands too, did you know that? Except, wait...that's not quite right. One of those exes hired you to hunt me down.» A breeze bellowed between two buildings and blew her hair into her eyes.

The Golem chuckled again. «I have already told you, it isn't personal for me, Widow.»

Without having to see she ducked and dove to the right, pulling her gun free from the small of her back to shoot through the center of the Golem's outstretched hand.

«I don't want to have to kill you, comrade,» Natasha warned him. The Golem had bent momentarily double over his injury, but quickly composed himself despite the sheen of sweat dotting his brow and upper lip. The shot had awoken people in the surrounding buildings, curious eyes peeking between drapes to see what the commotion was about. A siren started up nearby. «I can hide myself and play the victim. Can you do the same?»

«Your daughter will be dead by morning if you don't hand yourself over!» bellowed the Golem. He swung out with a massive arm and struck her across the face with his bloodied hand - in the same moment she took aim and shot him between the eyes. He fell like a stone and the street was silent.

For a breath Natasha stood, paralyzed, the Golem's blood sliding down her neck, and felt as powerful as a force of nature. Then she looked up. Looked up at the dozens of pairs of eyes watching a pool of blood and brain matter spread around her feet from the man she'd just murdered. Looked up at the faint gleam of cell phones capturing her in hi-definition video. Looked up, and felt her power fade.

She caught up her heel and vanished with the taste of blood in her mouth.

At the first public restroom that didn't require a Euro to get in, she washed the blood from her face and neck and the gun powder from her fingertips. She wrapped a scarf around her head like a _hijab_ to hide her hair and removed her jacket, which was ruined anyway, shoving it to the bottom of a garbage can. There was a bite to the early morning air but Natasha used it to pull her mind free of the fog settling between her ears.

So, it wasn't just Alexei. The entire Department knew about Katya. They knew about her daughter and were willing to outsource to bring Natasha in. Had the man at the airport arranged for the Golem to await her in Berlin? Probably. The real question was how they were tracking her. Not by her phone, Stark had made it untraceable for her "birthday" last year when Peter inevitably spilled the beans.

There were more sirens wailing now, and Natasha considered the weight of the phone in her pocket. It had been decades since she'd had to deal with police; she'd been better than this, good enough to avoid attracting authorities and with a clean-up team waiting when a job was done. Not since the war ended had she resorted to shoot-outs in the middle of the street. She wasn't even acting under SHIELD orders. If she were arrested for murder in Berlin they couldn't - and like wouldn't even try to - protect her, not unless she provided proof that she was working in SHIELD's best interests. The only way she could prove that was by finding the Red Room and their immaculate records, any indication that they'd hired the Golem to kill her first.

It struck her for not the first time that she hadn't been so alone in years. SHIELD had had her back in some form or another for the last decade and then some. She was attempting to single-handedly face the Department that buried her so deep within her own psyche she was still sometimes uncertain if the woman occupying her mind was really her, or just another skin to peel away. Could she do it? Their numbers were so scattered that they needed to outsource assassins, but it was the Department, the men who'd trained her, drugged and brainwashed her, taught her how to fight, taught her never to die without tearing down as many enemies as possible in the process.

_If you must die,_ they had told her, _die with their blood in your throat and their skin in your teeth._

They would tear her down like an old house.

* * *

1942

When they were fourteen, Nikolai, the head overseer of the Red Room division of the Department, came to Natalia and Yelena in their beds on two separate nights. Yelena cried and made a fuss but succumbed to him in the end, under the illusion that he could have her killed if she refused him. But he couldn't have killed either of them - they were too valuable; eight years had already been invested into their training and the world was at war again, they were necessary to the cause. Men like Nikolai, though, came a dime a dozen, managers of day-to-day life in the Department but otherwise useless and fat.

Natalia knew what Yelena hadn't known, so when Nikolai came to her bed the next night, she pulled a shard of a mirror she broke earlier that day from under the pillow and carved a chasm down his carotid artery.

She didn't cry out when his deadweight fell on her in a shower of blood, or fear for punishment from her trainers. They would be proud of her for being so quiet not to raise an alarm. Natalia kicked his body off of her cot and slept soundly until morning. Devils danced in her dreams that night.

* * *

2015

Her thumb hovered over the Call button on Clint's number. Then a police car screeched to a halt behind her, a woman shouted, "_Halt! Fräulein bleiben, wo Sie sind!_" and she slipped into the first side street to run for cover. All she could hear were the cacophonous screams of sirens all around her, surrounding her, sinking into her very bones, consuming her. If she was going in the right direction, if memory served, if she was fast enough, if she was lucky enough, then perhaps...

"What did I do?" she whispered to herself, breaking a window with her elbow to crawl into a basement once used by her kind of people. "What did I do? What did I _do?_"

By some miracle, the old tunnel they'd used to smuggle goods under No Man's Land back in their heyday was still intact. She propped the first thing she could find against the broken window, used her phone as a light, and ran headlong into the darkness.

* * *

"Any news?" Clint asked for probably the eighth time in half an hour.

Tony slapped both hands down onto the workbench. "God dammit! So help me, Barton...the SHIELD teams left twenty minutes ago, that's all any of us knows, and I will tell you when something new comes up!" he yelled in frustration. "Go put together a puzzle or something!"

Hardly listening, Clint crossed his arms and lumbered further into the workshop to lean across from Tony as he tinkered. "I just don't see why we can't be out there trying to find her ourselves," he groused. "We're supposed to be goddamned superheroes. It if were Pepper or Bruce out there fighting alone, I know you'd be out there trying to bring them home."

"That's different," replied Tony immediately, not even bothering to look up from the repairs on Dummy's arm joint.

"How?"

"Pepper and Bruce are not world-class super spies," he pointed out. "Nat can take care of herself."

As a knee-jerk reaction Clint said, "Don't call her Nat, you know she hates it." Then he glowered at Tony. "You don't think the Hulk can take care of himself in a jam? What, you don't think the rescue suit is enough to get Pepper home in one piece? Well gee whiz, Mister Stark, I thought your tech was the best in the world! but if you have to get out there are save your armored girlfriend and _indestructible boyfriend_, then I don't get why I shouldn't be trying to find and help my human, armorless wife who just had a baby!"

"Because, Barton, it's different!" Tony snapped again. Dummy whirred uneasily beneath him and he absently stroked a hand along his mechanical arm. Weirdo. "Natasha has all of SHIELD at her back. Bruce and Pepper have _me_; Bruce opted out of being directly affiliated with SHIELD aside from Avengers missions and Pepper hates those asshats just as much as I do. If Bruce and I get killed on a job, Maria still has at least one parent to come home to, but what happens to Katie if you two knuckleheads get yourselves killed out there?

"_Yes_, Bruce will be her legal guardian, and yes, we will raise her as best we can, but she will grow up missing parents she never even knew. Do you have any idea how much mourning people you've never met fucks with you? Do you _know_ how inadequate you feel compared to everyone's perfected idea of a dead person?" His voice grew thick and dark, and his picked up a wrench to point it accusingly at Clint over the top of the workbench. "It fucking _sucks_, Barton, and you're willing to put Katie through that? She will resent you, and cry for you without knowing why, and ask us if we only love her because of how much we loved you, and wonder every day if she meant _so little to you_ that you could leave her even when you didn't have to go, you fucking asshole. Natasha, she might be able to understand, since these assholes are threatening her, but you? She won't get it. You won't be there to make her feel better, and there's only so much Bruce can do, though he does seem particularly gifted with _orphans_, since you and Tasha seem to like him so much."

By the end of his rant they were both standing, hackles raised, raw and hurting in places they hadn't known existed until a stupid little stick turned blue, when there was a patter of running footsteps and a knock on the lab door as it slid open to admit Peter.

"Um," he said, noticing their defensively dejected stances. "Is this a bad time to tell you that Natasha's on the BBC?"

Tony swore fluently and in at least three languages as he pulled up a projection from the nearest surface. It was a brief report on the murder of a seven-foot-tall man in Berlin, censored video footage on YouTube for just an hour and a half already getting 18 thousand views for just how fucking weird it was. Even though the street was dark there was a nearby lamp illuminating the woman's long red hair. The man's face was censored, and then the whole left side of the screen when she shot him in the hand, they exchanged garbled words unheard over the gasps of people watching in the apartment, and then he hit her and she shot him again. She looked right up at the camera capturing her, the blood covering half her face looking black in the dark, and the picture closed in on her.

"Definitely Natasha," Clint faintly muttered.

The camera followed her for a few seconds when she ran before returning to the censored body. "_Heilige Scheiße!_" the man behind the camera gasped among screams from neighboring balconies. "_Heilige Scheiße!_"

The image cut to a reporter briefly explaining that the Berlin police were already on the lookout for the murderer, that no, the UN was not going to be involved despite the fact that both parties were speaking French, and it was unclear at the time whether the murder was related to gang activity.

The report ended and Tony switched off the projection, making sounds of disgust. "Why is it always gang activity?" he scoffed. "They were speaking French for Christ's sake, who's ever heard of a French gang? JARVIS, peek in on Agent Romanov, please."

"Peek in?" Peter echoed, but before he could actually ask what it meant the AI was speaking.

_Agent Romanov is uninjured_, he recited. _Her location is just north-east of Berlin, Germany. No calls have been made on her cell phone in the last 24 hours._

Nodding, "Thanks, J," Tony arched an eyebrow at Clint and spread his arms wide. "Peeking in: JARVIS is in all of our phones, blocking outside attempts to track us and retaining our privacy while still being able to access information on our well-being and location in emergencies. Still think I don't care about my teammates, Barton?" He grinned, dark and fierce. One of JARVIS's lenses whirred above them in silent agreement.

Clint blinked. "I've known your for almost four years, man, and you're still one scary son of a bitch," he scowled, but there was a hint of the respect he knew Stark deserved coloring his voice. "Just a peek, though, right?"

"Just a peek," confirmed Tony.

"No stalking."

"Nope."

"No 'peeking in' while we're in the shower?"

"Wouldn't dream of it, Bird Brains."


	4. Chapter 4

Natasha laid low until late morning, in an apartment left empty while its family was on vacation, when an outdoor market opened up across the street and filled with shoppers. She eased into the crowd, pilfered a hat, new shirt, and sunglasses, then eased out again within half an hour. No one recognized her; either she was very lucky or the Berlin police very slow. She waited until she was on a quiet street to pick the lock on a car - late 90s, not too old and not too new - find a spare key taped to the wheel well and set on the first road out of the country, bound for Prague instead of north.

A roadblock was set up in Dresden. Natasha climbed out of her car, jaw stubbornly set, and argued with a police officer in an obnoxious Bavarian accent for five minutes before climbing back in and turning around for another way out. The officers didn't even look at her twice, just another pissed-off tourist.

Word of the murder had spread to Prague by the time she stopped in a café to rest, using her Jersey accent to insist she didn't know Czech and order a sandwich. She loudly complained about, "This weird-ass excuse for food!" to a fax machine from her phone the entire time she ate, attracting resentful silence from the people around her. When she tried to meet their eyes they quickly glanced away. Hiding in plain sight wasn't her favorite method, too sloppy and imprecise, but it worked in a pinch when she didn't have enough resources for a full disguise.

Then again, sloppy and imprecise might work in her favor. She needed to find the Department, and the best way to do that would be to follow the paper trail, so to speak. The Golem couldn't have been the only assassin hired to tail and neutralize her; if the Department had hired anyone else they would probably be along in the next few hours. Possibly even tailing her right now.

She finished her food and stepped out of the cafe. Using the cash in her pockets, she bought a small computer at a nearby electronics shop, then set up shop outside of another cafe. For an hour she tried to find the trace on her own, but there was clearly nothing to go on. She packed up the laptop and stepped away again. When she climbed back into her car the passenger door opened and someone else slid in.

«Hello darkness, my old friend,» she greeted as she put the car into gear.

«Take the next left, dear.»

Natasha gritted her teeth and drove. It was always funnier in English.

She and Ninotchka met in the Russian ballet in 1997. For two years Natasha was the image of the perfect devoted dancer, and she and Ninotchka were paired together more often than not. Ninotchka was a beautiful ballerina and her father a powerful drug lord, trafficking cocaine and prostitutes all across Europe into Asia. The story was simple: Natalia was hired to find out where he was producing the drugs and Ninotchka knew the place. They were close. They were lovers, for a time. Then there came a night where they needed a place to go after a recital when they were drunk enough to catch hell, and Ninotchka knew the perfect place.

Needless to say, Natalia had only been pretending to be drunk. She took the information and left Ninotchka while she was sleeping. Heartbreak made her vengeful, and over the ensuing years it grew into an obsession of sorts for the woman to try killing her time and again. It got her a reputation and a job when she got too old to dance.

«You're looking old,» Natasha conversationally said.

Ninotchka made a low snarling noise. «And you're looking fat. How's the baby?»

«Is someone jealous?» A thin clawlike hand closed around her throat; her muscles stiffened to attention. «Touchy. The baby's fine. Though you'll never see for yourself, since you'll soon be dead.»

«Oh, I'm sure about that,» scoffed Ninotchka. «Take this turning.»

She followed her old dancing partner's directions for two hours, much of it spent in tense silence. Ninotchka turned on the radio. Whoever owned the car must have been a Queen fanatic, because it flew out the speakers at them and Natasha started to laugh. Two years ago he dressed as Mercury in drag for Halloween and she let him talk her into being Bowie.

Quietly enraged by how much she was laughing, Ninotchka switched off the radio and fumed the rest of the drive. They wound up outside a cabin sitting just on the Czech and Polish border, and it was then that her unworthy adversary pulled out a gun. «In the house,» Ninotchka demanded, and Natasha climbed out of the car. She moved with caution, hands up and bag abandoned in the car to avoid being shot before she got her information. That would have been a massive setback.

«You aren't going to kill me, Nitchka.»

Ninotchka shoved her through the door toward a single chair in the middle of the room, with thick leather straps attached. How original. «I'm bored already,» she sighed, earning herself a kick in the back with stiletto boots. «Nitchka, look at me.»

The gun's barrel pressed between her eyes. «Don't you dare call me that again, or your brains will be on the wall,» she snarled.

«So you _weren't_ planning on killing me?» Natasha innocently asked.

Something like confusion shimmered across the planes of the ex-dancer's face before hardened into a vicious mask. She strapped Natasha into the chair and turned to a cabinet against the eastern wall. «You pretty fool,» she murmured as she pulled out a series of knives, needles, and other household tools. «You Westernized whore. Did you think you could break my heart, destroy my father, condemn us to a life of poverty, and I would just kill you? No, no, I can't just let you roll over and _die_ like a sick dog. Not until I've made you hurt as I have hurt, not until you suffer like I've suffered. After all, Natalia, killing people is easy, but making them suffer is an art form. You taught me that.»

The spot where Ninotchka's boot pierced her burned against the back of the chair. «You think I haven't suffered?» she asked, voice rough. «You think a few scant years is anything compared to the hundreds of lives I've led? Have you even spoken to the men who hired you to know why they want me? Nitchka, Nitchka, please just look at me!» It was easier to make herself shake and sweat than it was before the serum was reversed, when she was damn near invincible. It had been more of an act back then, but now, with mortality so much closer at hand, the act was laced with truth.

She saw the slap coming a mile off but didn't recoil from it. «_I've been looking!_» shrieked Ninotchka. With the sunlight shining on her face she looked frail and ancient. When they'd met she'd been 21 and was now nearing 40, childless, friendless, driven mad by revenge and the life of a third-rate assassin. «I looked at you for two years while you lied to my face; I'm tired of looking! Your face sickens me! The Department wants you dead or alive, and so _I_ will enjoy you dead.» From the cabinet she pulled a syringe and bottle of red liquid, approaching hesitantly.

«But they'd prefer if I were alive,» Natasha blurted out, recognizing the luminescent red of the drug in the bottle as it filled the syringe, recognizing the look on Ninotchka's face. «When I'm dead, will you feel better? You'll be, what, two hundred grand wealthier, sure, but after that? The Department won't take you on, you're too old, and the very fact that you know the Department exists means you know too much. You aren't worth the funding to wipe your memory. As soon as I'm gone you'll be disposed of too. Nitchka, I'm _sorry!_»

The needle was already under her skin but the plunger remained in place. «Give me a reason why I should believe you. _One good reason_,» she hissed.

Natasha stared into her blue eyes, blocking out her own fear and desperation, thinking instead of Clint and Katya and bringing out what she felt when she was with them. «Because I loved you too,» she confessed in a rush. «Or I thought I did. Nitchka, they - the Department programmed me to fall in love with you, be your ideal partner, everything a falsified personality. and as soon as I had the intel on your father they pulled it all out. I...I wasn't even the same person but I felt _empty_ without you, yet I didn't love you anymore, and it frightened me so I ran from it, from you, and never stopped.

«If it were another world, Nitchka,» she plowed on, remembering the crap story Bucky tried to spin her the year before. «If you were just a girl and I were just a girl dancing with you, I could have loved you my whole life. And in the end, I wanted nothing but your happiness...and if you ever loved me, you would want the same. You would let me go home to my husband and child, and let me repay the hurt I caused you by being better to them. Our moment passed, Nitchka, but this is my moment. Giving up this dirty business and just quietly disappearing into the woodwork, I would do it for you, Nitchka, please.»

A long moment passed as doubt skittered across Ninotchka's face. Her eyelashes started to tremble, and there was a sudden burning pain in Natasha's arm.

_No!_

When she gasped Ninotchka jerked the needle from her arm and threw it across the room, barely any of the drug deployed and shattering open. «It was an accident!» she yelped, and when Natasha started gasping in horror and a mockery of pain loosened the straps on the chair. «Natalia, my Natalia-!»

The moment her legs were free Natasha kicked her in the diaphragm with both feet, then swapped their places before Ninotchka could catch her breath.

«You're right,» she crooned to Ninotchka as she screamed and struggled against the restraints. «Making people suffer_ is_ an art form, and you've just invited Vermeer to use your paint brush. Tell me where the Department is hiding and I'll kill you quickly.»

«_Traitorous bitch!_» Ninotchka howled.

After tenderly kissing her forehead, Natasha turned to the cabinet of tools and pulled out a screw driver. The puncture in her arm burned but her hand didn't shake. «Then let's begin,» she sweetly said, smiling at Ninotchka's enraged screams. Angry hearts were always the easiest to fool.

* * *

The team was split up into small groups and sent off to several major cities around Europe, set up with chains of code and commands to follow if they came across Agent Romanov. Emma still had no idea how they would ever manage to find her with the whole world out there, but Agent X was confident.

"Once she knows we're there and not a threat, she'll come to us," he said with conviction. "Stark put her last known location outside Berlin - Team Alpha, you'll be there. All likelihood is that she's on her way to Russia, so Team Foxtrot will be stationed in Moscow and Team Echo will be with me in St Petersburg, where the Department's main operations were stationed. According to Romanov's intel, the Red Room's headquarters were somewhere near the Finnish border."

Subtly, barely moving at all, Morris and Sterling shared a wide-eyed look. Was it a good or bad thing that they were Team Echo? Did Agent X think they were so incompetent they needed his help, or just competent enough to be granted the privilege of working with him? Either way they were going to have to tread carefully and try not to screw anything up. Try not to get Romanov killed on their first big mission together.

"Think you're gonna be able to handle it?" Sterling asked on the jet.

She shot him a sharp look. "Why, think _you_ are?" she snapped, then they both shut up because X was looking their way. Still in the hat and shades, still mysterious as ever. Emma wondered if he didn't just like the power-kick he got from complete anonymity. She wouldn't put it past him; people on the internet did it all the time.

Their jet landed in St. Petersburg and they quickly moved in to set up the cover. "The jet will be waiting in a secure location. If Romanov's spotted in any of the other cities, we'll be there within an hour," X told them. Setting up their laptops in a lopsided triangle on a cafe table, they settled in to wait.

* * *

_Agent Barton, I feel it may be prudent to alert you that Mister Stark is about to take a call from Agent Romanov in the communal lounge_, JARVIS announced.

Clint was on his feet before the message ended, snatching up the nearest baby monitor before running to the penthouse. "Tony, are you-?" he asked, but Tony was already waving at him to shut up.

"What do you need, Tasha?" he asked. Bruce, Pepper, Steve, Peter, and Sharon all rushed in on Clint's heels.

Natasha's breathing sounded uneven, and there was a voice that didn't belong to her moaning _Sankt Peterburg_ over and over again in the background. "I need a jet, a fast one that can be here within an hour," Natasha said, her voice barely trembling enough to be noticed. "I'm close. I'm so close to ending this, I just need to get there and then I can..." suddenly the other voice wailed out and Natasha gasped; there was a great crash, a moan, and then only the sound of their teammate's heavy breathing.

Brow furrowed, intensely concentrating as he arranged for a jet with one hand, Tony cast a momentary sidelong glance at the others then asked, "What's going on over there, Tash? Talk to me, are you hurt? JARVIS, peek in."

_Agent Romanov is-_

"Uninjured," Natasha gasped. "I've - I've been drugged. The Red Room drug. They used it to knock us out, shut out brains off and make us...make us complacent for brainwashing. It was a smaller dose but..."

"Natasha, this is Bruce," he said when she trailed off, anxiously polishing his glasses. "Do you know what the drug is, could you identify it?"

Another gasp. The wailing woman started to quietly moan. "It's red," Natasha said with a shiver in her voice. "After the first few d-dozen doses or so, the brainwashing isn't even needed. Conditioning. I don't know if the dose was strong enough but if it was then...I might be in trouble, Doc." Her voice was curdled and small like days-old milk left out to rot and Clint could see her in his mind's eye, knees pulled tight against her chest, staring out over a room empty save for the woman she had just tortured.

"JARVIS, do scans if you can, try to identify the chemicals," Bruce murmured.

_I will do my best, Doctor, but it may be difficult from this distance._

"Tony, is...is Clint there?"

Heart at his lips, water in his legs, Clint had to clear his throat before answering Tony's nod. "I'm right here," he said. "How you feeling, sugar?"

"It...hurts. I can feel it burning in my blood. You always wanted to know. This is how it feels...to be unmade."

She sounded so small, hollow and flat that it made Clint's skin crawl. This wasn't his wife speaking to him; this was a lethal woman pinned to a dirty wall with his arrow, glaring at him with hatred through the pouring rain. "You don't have to tell me," he said, the spaces behind his eyes tight.

"I want you to know," Natasha slurred, crackling over the miles between them. "I want you to know because of Twilight Protocol, because this is..._this is your fault_."

Everyone started talking at once, trying to defend Clint from something they didn't know a thing about. "Nat, you don't know what you're saying-"

"_No, this is your fault!_" Natasha snarled, voice thin with too much air and unbridled rage. "_You did this! If you had just followed orders like you were supposed to none of this would be happening, do you hear me, Barton?! Do you-?!"_ She broke off with another gasp and the deafening rustle of fabric as she shoved her phone into a pocket over JARVIS's sound system.

Then the distinct sound of vehicles ploughing through underbrush and shouting in another language. "French," Tony muttered, his face falling. "Interpol must have found her. She's...oh good, she's taken a hostage, and is...yep, threatening to kill the hostage if they don't give her a head start of ten minutes. And they..." His face didn't just fall; it crashed and burned. "They don't negotiate with terrorists. Oh, fuck me. A jet's half an hour out from my place in Monaco - it's practically gonna break the law of physics, let me tell you something. Fastest bird I've got, barely big enough to fit a box of matches, and it'll look good doing it. If Romanov gets herself shot down, so help me..." He trailed off guiltily and looked at Clint.

Honestly, Clint didn't care if Tony made a bad joke. Not with Natasha running for her life halfway across the world mingling with the sound of Kate sleeping over the monitor clipped to his belt. Natasha blamed him for all of this, for putting Kate in danger, for the terror they both felt as she shot her hostage fifty meters from interpol, and he could hardly begrudge her that.

* * *

This is how it could have been:

A man who called himself Alian and a woman who called herself Ksenja left for the shores of America when rumors surfaced that the missing princess might still be alive. Their daughter was born in Brooklyn, and they called her Natasha so she could better fit in with their American neighbors. Alian worked cleaning in factories after hours. Ksenja did laundry. They were by no means wealthy, but they got by.

Natasha was not a "tomboy," as the kids were calling them. Tomboys wore trousers and tucked their hair up into hats and played baseball, trying to pass off for boys, while Natasha made no qualms of wearing a dress or letting her hair fall in a braid down the middle of her back. Baseball didn't interest her in the least. She just liked to fight. Everywhere she went, violence followed, and if she wasn't fighting then she was starting a fight by whispering poison into the other children's ears. No number of her mother's tears or father's scoldings could stop her fighting.

She tried to join the army but they wouldn't take her. The recruitment officer (allegedly) told her that nurses were always good to have around, and was (allegedly) found two days later, wandering Coney Island without any trousers. The woman who called herself Ksenja died of an infection, after miscarrying a baby. Some of Natasha's wildness left the world with her.

Eventually, after a few years, something changed and things were easier. Natasha got a steady job and told her father it was bookkeeping. He didn't quite believe her when she came home sporting bruises and with a knife strapped to her thigh. She married a veteran with one arm who called himself Bucky. A nice young man. Such a shame they couldn't have children.

Years went by in quiet supplication, neither happiness nor unhappiness, feeling as though there were something greater missing from the chasm in her ribs. Natasha watched her body age with silent horror, watched her husband become a bitter drunk over his disability, watched her father grow old and die, and felt as if there had been something else she was supposed to do, something more, something she was meant to do before her time came, but she died in a fire in 1978, on a boy named Clint Barton's first birthday.

* * *

**Anyone care to review, let me know how I'm doing? :D**


	5. Chapter 5

2003, March

Clint was a meager twelve weeks out of the army and into SHIELD's ranks (or out of the frying pan and into the fire) when Agent Coulson approached him at home for the first time. He was still learning how to be paranoid about his little New York apartment, keeping it locked up tight or whatever, and Coulson didn't hesitate in offering a few pointers by showing up in his kitchen without so much as a sound _suggesting_ knocking.

"You know this milk's gone bad?"

The handle of his frying pan embedded itself in the wall beside Coulson's head. "_The fuck you doing in my house?!_" Clint yelled, 26 years old, raw after six years of military service and hardened after a lifetime working for more than he was worth.

Coulson's eyebrows twitched. "The fuck are _you_ doing with these shoddy locks?" he mildly countered. "If I were an enemy your head would be missing right now and your bacon would burn."

"I hope _your_ bacon burns," grumbled Clint, crossing the tiny kitchen to wrench his pan out of the wall. Who was gonna pay for _that?_ "Can you either, y'know, _not_ or cut to the chase? Gahhh, I fuckin' hate all this cryptic Man of Mystery bullshit you fuckers keep trying to throw at me."

"Meanwhile, you're throwing _crockery_ at intruders."

Clint downright growled as he tossed a dishtowel at the senior agent and started cleaning grease off the floor and walls. "A man should be able to make breakfast in his own house without having to batten down the hatches."

"Not a SHIELD agent," replied Coulson. "Never a SHIELD agent. It's a new world you came home to from Afghanistan, Agent Barton, and you're going to need to adjust to accommodate it."

"I've done plenty of adjustin', thanks."

Coulson sighed. It was true, though; Clint had been seeing a SHIELD-ordained psychiatrist since he was plucked out of the desert. The evaluations rated him as very well-adjusted, other than the occasional screaming night terror. "Now, if you tell me what you think you're doing in my house, I might even make you a pancake before I kick your ass out. No bacon."

From the depths of his jacket Coulson pulled out a file folder and placed it on the table. A blurry photo of a red-haired young woman spilled out onto the floor. Clint picked it up and stared, getting grease stains on the glossy paper. A gaze as sharp as a knife, long hair like fire, and a dress that could give a geriatric a heart attack. She was pretty.

"How would you like to retire by the time you're thirty?" Coulson asked with a hint of a smile.

Clint looked up from the curve of the woman's cheek and frowned. SHIELD didn't kid around when they offered early retirement; this was a serious hit, a career maker. So who was it? What was so special about some teenager? He tossed the picture back onto the table and crossed his arms. "I'm listening."

* * *

2015

Natasha left Ninotchka's body in a thicket of weeds and ran as quickly as her feet could carry her, Clint and Tony's voices still eking out of the little earpiece she'd tucked in to call for the jet, crashing through brambles and vines before silently back-tracking from the tree branches, leaving a false trail for Interpol to follow. It wasn't enough, at least not right away, but it kept them busy. And made her tired. How long had it been since she slept? What day was it? How long had she been torturing Ninotchka before she confirmed Natasha's suspicions?

The Department was back where they started, in St Petersburg. If there was anything left of the Red Room they would likely be on the border like before as well, sequestered away in the Taiga where no one could find them.

But Natasha could find them.

She waited until nightfall, when Interpol retreated to the cabin to gather what evidence they could and Ninotchka's body, before lowering herself from the trees and walking. The darkness was her friend, ever since she was a little girl she had known how to unmake herself in the night time and come together again, reborn, with the sun. It was always what she was best at.

The muted roar of the jet landing at a farm three kilometers off was pretty unmistakable, so Natasha coaxed her stiff and heavy bones into a run before Interpol could catch on that something was up, that it wasn't just an emergency landing...

Which, after a moment's thought, she supposed it was.

The pilot was standing outside the jet, waiting and wringing his hands, when Natasha staggered to the barn. «You are Romanov?» he asked in French.

She ignored him and his protests and climbed into the cockpit. That's all the jet really was, the controls and a crawlspace just big enough to accommodate the Iron Man suit. The controls were basic enough for her to operate with her SHIELD experience; thank goodness for small favors. Or thank Stark. She left the pilot at the farm and took off, turning on auto pilot as soon as it was safe and curling her knees to her chest.

Hatred burned like fire through her veins. She knew it was an effect of the drug, knew it was pushing her back into the old self the Red Room carved into the inside of her skull, and yet she couldn't help riding the crest, letting it wash over and consume her. It would carry her through the last legs of this impossible race, even if it made her snap at her husband.

_It's true, though_, a treacherous voice in the back of her mind whispered. _It's his fault, all of it, Ninotchka dead, Katerina would never know you, all because he couldn't do as he'd been told. He was weak. He made you weak when he saved you and made you love him. You don't even have the serum anymore. You could have been invincible!_

But Katerina wouldn't exist.

Natasha lowered her head to her knees and closed her eyes.

* * *

This is how it could have been:

Her baby was born in the wind and snow, weak and sickly after Natalia spent so many days without food, but squalling red with life. Natalia looked around at the frozen dead flowers and named her Rosa. The little family she saved from the approaching army took her in, hid her and the baby from the Russians when they came looking, started calling them Natasha and Rose, and after months had passed they could safely flee.

First she went to France, stole clothes and diapers to get through the month, and worked in a cafe with Rose strapped to her hip. She didn't trust anyone to watch the baby. As soon as there was enough money in her hand she boated across the Channel and took a train to London. In the thick of everything it was easier to hide, except they knew her face, knew her weaknesses, knew where to hit.

On Rose's first birthday a news bulletin was released over the radio, seeking a young red headed woman who ran away from her home in Russia a year previous, begging her to return because her father was dying and wanted to see his grandchild.

"We hope that young Natalia receives the message and finds her way safely home," the newsman said, and Natasha flicked off the radio.

By then Rose was big enough to walk and even babble little words. Natasha bundled her up against the January cold and took the first train to a western port city. They were getting on the next boat to America or she would die trying to get as far from the Department's reach as possible. She didn't know the proper channels to travel through, but if she had to inform on the Department's inner workings to the American government to keep herself and her baby alive, she would.

There was too much ice built up around the port for a boat to get through. They would have to wait until April. Natasha found the smallest most discreet flat in Liverpool to hole up and wait for spring, like hunted animals forced into hibernation. She was afraid even to take Rose out to play in the snow, constantly watching over her shoulder for the old agents to take what was theirs. Nightmares plagued her every sleeping moment, and being awake was little better, consumed by so much fear and paranoia that even a knock on the door posed a threat.

One night she woke up from a blood-soaked nightmare to the old air raid sirens malfunctioning, blaring through the windows and making them rattle, and Natasha broke. It was the Department, they found her, they were coming, they would kill her and take Rose instead, tell her baby that _Mother never loved you, she let us have you for thirty pounds_, and it wasn't true, it wasn't true! Natasha loved her, loved her more than she had ever loved anything, and that was why the Department couldn't have her, couldn't touch a hair of her precious head-

She pressed the pillow down hard until Rose stopped squirming, then realized that at some point in the last few minutes the sirens had stopped, and police were calling for frightened people to return to their homes.

A false alarm.

Rose was dead.

She returned to her fathers in a stolen army aircraft the next afternoon, and devoted the remainder of her short life to tearing the Department down from the inside out. They didn't even see her coming.

* * *

2015

Steve looked around when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and found Sharon leaning in the doorway. "Why aren't you going after her?" she asked. "The last time this happened it was all you could talk about, finding her and swooping in to save the day. So what changed?" Stepping into the room, she wrapped an arm around his waist to look at the map with him.

"Well, the last time this happened was...different," he lamely said. "We thought Natasha had defected, and were protecting her from SHIELD in case they thought she had to be terminated. Now we know she's still herself, and SHIELD are out there ready to help her, not stop her."

"So the Avengers aren't needed. You're just not going when she could be-she could be dying out there, you just aren't going to help her."

"I didn't say we weren't needed," Steve said, more apologetic than before, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and holding her against his side. "But Doctor Doom's been stirring up a lot of tension; we can't leave the country right now or he might take advantage. It's not ideal, but I believe that SHIELD are more competent than us in these instances. Natasha needs stealth and a bunch of overgrown men running around in spangly costumes isn't going to help her."

Mouth twisting, Sharon leaned into him and sighed. "God, when did I become the girlfriend - fiance, sorry - of an _actual_ superhero? When did a borderline psychopathic super-spy become my best friend? This is going to have an averse affect on our kids, let me tell you something. Speaking of that, do you want to have kids? Or, more kids? Do you think they'll be like you pre-serum or post-serum? Not that having kids with asthma is a problem for me or anything, I mean, I'm a medical professional, there are a lot of things worse than asthma. But, like, you're huge, right? And you might have super-sperm. I'm tiny! I just don't want your, l don't know, Adonis-babies all stuck up in me if we ever - oh, I'm _joking!_" She loosed a peal of anxious laughter at the look on his face, reaching up with both hands to pull down his face so she could kiss him. "I'm just screwing with you! I know it's way too soon to think about kids, don't worry so much."

"Yeah, I reckon we should focus on getting married first," smiled Steve anxiously. "I know things are hard right now, but we'll get through it. Natasha will be home before we know it and everything will be fine."

She nodded and bit her lip. "Y'know, if I weren't so worried about her being drugged and lost and hunted by Interpol, I'd be spitting mad. She _promised_ to talk to me if anything came up. She promised."

But they both knew that, technically, Natasha never went back on that promise. This hadn't just come up in the past few weeks, it had been ongoing for as long as Natasha could remember, all her life, following her closer than a shadow and consuming every bit of light that dared shine over her. Just because they had hidden for a while didn't mean they'd ever been gone, only waiting. Now they were back, threatening everything Natasha had spent lifetimes fighting for... None of them could say they would have acted differently, were they in her shoes, not if it was Jamie or little Maria in danger.

They watched the hourglass steadily inch across the map toward Russia, trying to push back the knowledge that their friend and teammate was alone out there. Then there was a sound behind them and they turned as one to find Clint in the door, weighed down by Katerina in her car seat and the cloak of fear on his shoulders.

"I'm taking Katie-Kate to the Helicarrier," he announced. "It's the safest place for her right now, and the first place Tasha's gonna be taken when when all this is over. Chopper leaves in an hour if you wanna come."

He turned on his heel to leave, but Sharon called, "Hey, wait a sec! What did Tasha mean earlier? On the phone, with the whole 'following orders' thing? What did she tell you to do, did you know this was going to happen?"

"'course I didn't," frowned Clint. A small sound came from the car seat and he shifted in place to rock it. "It wasn't about that, it was...something else."

Sharon and Steve's eyebrows shot up in matching suspicious looks. But they didn't push it, just nodded and let him go. She turned to Steve. "Will you follow him? Make sure he takes care of himself and kick him in the pants when he doesn't?" she asked, and Steve nodded. "Thanks, babe. I just got off a long shift and I need to catch some sleep."

"Sure, of course, I'll call as soon as there's news," agreed Steve. He dropped a kiss to her forehead and followed Clint's trail out.

As soon as they were both gone Sharon took a deep breath, mastered herself, remembered the rush of adrenaline after her best friend shot at her head, and took the stairs down to Stark's lab. He was crashing around to Zeppelin, trying to keep busy and distract himself, but glanced up when he caught sight of her in the corner of his eye. "Hey, Share-bear, what's up?" he distractedly asked.

She swallowed. "I want to go after Natasha," she said, and yeah, that caught Stark's attention. "I should be on that team but they shot me down for some godforsaken reason. If Tasha's been hurt or drugged, she's going to need medical attention as soon as possible anyway, so this would be in her best interests. Besides, I _know_ you're dying to find her first and rub Agent X's nose in it." Eyebrows twitching up, she shot him a tantalizing grin.

His eyes narrowed, but she just kept grinning until he threw down the blow torch. "Fuck it, let's go."

"_Yes!_"

Fifteen minutes later she, Stark, and Parker were in a car bound for Stark's private air field. Peter looked unspeakably nervous but Sharon was grimly thrilled. She hardly ever got to go out into the field anymore and that had been her favorite part of the job, diving into unfamiliar territory with just her wits and a medical kit to protect her where anything could happen. The agents' lives and safety sat in the palm of her hand.

She just hoped her palm was big enough to hold this.

* * *

The landing gear on Stark's untested new jet failed. Rather than take a St. Petersburg airport by surprise as planned, she coasted the rest of the way to the Taiga, aiming for the old bunker's approximate location, and eased it town onto the thick canopy of evergreens.

"Easing" the jet down sounded a lot simpler than its execution. There was still a tremendously resounding crash that would be heard for miles around and she cracked her head on the flight deck. The jet settled with a groan only meters from the lake she knew like the back of her own hand. Shaped like a horseshoe, the site of the Red Room in the center and a steep hill on the open side behind it. The facilities had been rebuilt somewhere down the line and there was only one bridge to it, no surprise that it was guarded to the teeth, and they all heard her coming. So much for a quiet entrance.

Machine guns reported from across the water before she even made it out of the jet. She wormed her way through the shattered windshield and crawled on all fours into the underbrush. There was a ditch to sequester herself in when a pair of guards came to inspect the wreckage, keeping them in her sights as they trudged nearer and spotted the Stark Industries logo on the side of the jet. When they looked around for the missing pilot, looked from the shattered windshield to the lake, and started to laugh, Natasha silently crawled from her hiding spot and approached them from behind.

She used her elbow to crack the one on the left's ribs, then snatched the right's gun when he was surprised and used it as a club to knock them both out. Then she fell onto her bottom on the forest floor. A riot of colors danced in her vision, half-baked memories of her first SHIELD mission, the smell of key lime pie, the sound of Clint's laugh from underwater, and for a long moment she wondered if she was dying.

Then it all cleared with a moderate breeze. Natasha wasn't certain if she was grateful for the breeze or annoyed for the concussion.

Gripping the gun in both hands, she started toward the bridge but quickly realized that she didn't have the firepower or the manpower to cross it. Most of the reports had come from these guns and they felt enormously heavy with the head injury. The Russians weren't exactly known for keeping beasts in their moats, at least not in Natalia's time there, so the threw the gun aside and found cover until nightfall.

When she slipped into the water her foot caught on a weed that was really a tripwire, and the surface of the lake burst into flames. That was okay, water was denser than fuel, it wasn't an even cover, and she was a strong swimmer. Natasha surged toward the flames instead of running away, sucked in a breath, and dove.

The water was cold. Natasha kept her head angled up until she could see a break in the fire, then surfaced for air. She sucked in a breath then dove again, lungs burning with smoke but she couldn't cough, had to keep moving, keep clawing forward; why was this so difficult? Clear as day Natasha remembered being able to swim underwater for four minutes before...

Before the serum had been reversed.

The recollection made panic stir in her veins and she kicked herself forward, searching for a new place to surface. When she broke free again, though, there was no breathable air, all of it sucked away to fuel the flames. Natasha had no choice but to dive again, scraping her fingernails through the water, over the fabric of reality, fighting the feeling that her chest was about to cave in with a soaring rage boiling under her skin, _his fault, his fault, his fault!_

A bubble of air slipped from her lips, then more, and she realized she was screaming.

Darkness encroached, then something seized her around the middle and _yanked_. A foreign shape was shoved into her mouth. Air returned. It was too dark to see, now, but there was air and where there was air dwelled life. Natasha clung to whoever was holding her, uncaring if it was enemy or friend, her every muscle burning with the lake.

With a great splash they broke the surface in what looked like a drainage pipe, when Natasha finally opened her eyes. She staggered away from the stranger and threw the oxygen mask away, coughing the last of the smoke from her lungs and trying to clear the water from her eyes.

"Just take a deep breath, Nat, just breathe."

She coughed once, twice, breathed, then realized the concussion must have been worse than she thought. That almost sounded like Coulson.

Then he was in her line of vision, real, solid, quietly deploring his ruined suit, and Natasha had to blink again.

"Thought I told you...not to call me 'Nat,'" she said between gasps for clean air.

Coulson smiled as two other agents surfaced behind her. "What can I say? I'm a rebel."

* * *

**It's my 20th birthday today! Which means hopefully, as my gift to you guys, I will FINISH THIS DARN THING TONIGHT and will be able to start posting twice a week instead of once. It's really getting out of hand, but I DID figure out how I'm going to end it, so hopefully everything will run smoothly. Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear back from you on this one!**


	6. Chapter 6

Emma felt like her ass was falling asleep by the time Agent X got the call that Agent Romanov was in a Stark Industries jet sailing _over_ St Petersburg, rather than landing there. X was immediately on his feet and heading for a vehicle rental shop. They were going to have to get the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible if they wanted to meet her there. "What do we do if we get there after she's...invaded?" she asked as they hurried down the street.

"Then we invade _second_," replied X.

Couldn't argue with that logic. Emma and Erikson exchanged a look behind X's back and hurried to flank him. It occurred that Erik hadn't even spoken directly to X yet, only channeling his questions through getting her to ask first. She could see that there was something on his mind by the way he was looking at her and mouthing incomprehensible words around X's head; she rolled her eyes at him.

"Sir, I think Agent Sterling has a question, but he's too nervous to ask you so instead he's being an asshole and putting all our lives in danger."

A shocked, high-pitched sound crawled up from the back of Sterling's throat and Morris smirked at him. X raised his eyebrows but kept his gaze forward. "The only stupid question is the one you don't ask, Agent Sterling," he said, then kept walking. He flashed his badge at the man behind the reception desk and was led to a door away from the main garage. Emma shot Sterling a look and nodded for him to get it over with, but he stubbornly shook his head and didn't say a word. Idiot.

They were given one in a long line of UAZs sitting innocuously in the tucked-aside garage. Clearly they had a very specific purpose for being there, since theirs was equipped with weapons, a heavy-duty first aid kit, and other survival tools in the back. "Oxygen tanks?" frowned Emma, sorting through everything for future reference.

X only gestured for her to get into the middle passenger seat; there was no back seat and she was the smallest, so she had to squeeze between X and Sterling. "This feels markedly _less_ glamorous than my recruiter made being a secret agent sound," she wryly commented as they slid into afternoon work traffic. X may have even cracked a real smile.

"Keep your eyes on the sky," instructed the senior agent. "It's a vey small, very fast jet unlike one you've probably ever seen before, so we might be able to catch a glimpse between the commercial flights, especially once we get further out of the city. We'll just have to try to follow her trail as best we can. Agent Sterling, have you contacted the other strike teams?"

"I did, sir," Sterling nodded. "They're on their way as quickly as possible, but it could be a few hours. I also took a call from Deputy Director Hill while you were checking out the car; she said to remind you of Twilight Protocol?" His voice was hesitant as he brought up the procedure he'd never heard of, and the smile slid off X's face just like that.

She glanced between them before turning to X. "What's that?" she asked.

They took a turning off the main road. "Not an option."

Night had nearly fallen by the time they found the jet's trail streaking through the sky, fading fast, leading to a column of smoke rising above the treetops. The UAZ jerked as Agent X - heedless of the other drivers on their stretch of road - jammed the gas pedal to the floor in pursuit.

When the underbrush got too thick even for their robust vehicle to crash through, X switched it off and was climbing out before they even had the chance to unbuckle their seat belts. He ran ahead to the jet's wreckage while they pulled guns and ammo from the back of the car, then ran after him. The closer they got to X and the wrecked jet the more clearly they could hear him calling, "Nat! Nat!" into the cockpit.

"Completely wrecked, Stark's going to be furious, I could sing," reported X as he climbed down. He didn't look as though he much felt like singing, deep lines in his face, hat and glasses abandoned in the dark now. He looked much older when they could see his face and receding hairline.

Sterling reported, "We got bodies here, sir," as he nudged a pair of armored guards with his toe. Waving at him to keep quiet, movements jerky and agitated, he moved to search the underbrush.

Then the lake in front of them burst into flames and a shadow shaped like Agent Romanov melded into the water with a splash. "_Natasha!_" X yelled over the roaring fires. Then he spun around to Emma. "Go back to the-the Jeep, get four of the smaller oxygen tanks, extra guns, and a water-tight bag to put them in - _now!_"

"_You want us to dive in there!? Are you insane!?_"

"_JUST DO IT!_"

Suddenly flooded with terror, Emma turned and ran back to the UAZ. Evergreen needles whipped her and rough bark scraped her skin, running blind, too afraid of being detected to use the flashlight clipped to her belt until she reached her destination. She realized her palms were bleeding when she started digging through the equipment. First came the bag, hastily unfolded with shuddering hands, but she couldn't find the small oxygen tanks until she'd pushed half the vehicle's contents aside. They and the guns were stowed in the bag, a handful of the first aid kit's contents, and she staggered back to the wreck with it bouncing against the backs of her legs.

Agent X was still fidgeting with hands on his waist when Emma got back, staring out over the combustible lake. His suit jacket was gone, shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow and tie abandoned, and he snatched the bag away before she even had the chance to hold it out for him. "Follow me with the rest," he demanded, handing it back before putting his tank's mouthpiece in and diving through a wall of flames into the water without hesitation, the other tank in his hand.

After pulling the bag from her shoulder to his, Sterling gripped her shoulders to get a good look at her. "You okay? Em, are you okay?" he asked.

No. No, Emma _wasn't_ okay, this was her first mission and the world was on fire and she was scared out of her mind, but this wasn't about her. This was about Agent Romanov, and getting her home any way but in a box. That was what made her spit, "I'm _fine!_" and shove Sterling away to follow Agent X.

The only reason she could see where she was going underwater was the fire burning at the surface, slowly burning out as the fuel was exhausted. She surfaced with Sterling just as X was saying "What can I say? I'm a rebel," shaking water out of her eyes with Sterling's hand on her elbow to steady her shaking. She shoved him off again and pulled the bag from his shoulder to pull out the first aid kit. X's hand was waiting for it, and he quickly guided Romanov to sit against the damp drainage pipe's side.

"You're dead," she baldly said to X as he examined every angle of her bruised and battered face. "You're..._Coulson_, you're supposed to be _dead_..."

Sterling moved to the opening of the pipe to keep a watch, and Emma noticed that X - Agent Coulson? The one who'd died, with a plaque to his memory on the Helicarrier? - had a faint smile on his face as his hand moved to Romanov's shoulder and squeezed. "And you're supposed to be at home with a new baby, but we can't all fulfill expectations," he mildly said, just like commenting on his 'rusty' aim back at the range.

"Natasha, look at me," he said firmly, and her eyes flickered up to meet his. "You're exhausted, and you're injured. Help is on the way but not for hours yet. We're seriously outmanned and outgunned. If we can just go back to the woods and wait..."

A hand closed around his wrist and he trailed off. "Coulson," Natasha whispered, shivering. She pulled her phone from her pocket - completely destroyed by water damage, but the background picture of Clint and Katerina was frozen, flickering, on the main screen. She wasn't asking permission, wasn't begging him to let her end this tonight. She was telling him he had a choice to make. Either Coulson could help her destroy the people who would destroy her life, or he could walk away, wait for help to come, and let her die trying to do it alone.

Coulson stood. "Get Agent Romanov a gun," he told Emma, who scrambled to comply. "Agent Romanov, this is Agent Morris and that's Agent Sterling, they're going to help us."

Romanov didn't even look at Emma, just got laboriously to her feet and took the offered gun. At the lip of the pipe Sterling made a warning gesture that someone was coming. Keeping along the sides of the wide pipe to avoid treading water, they hurried deeper under the facility until reaching a basement-level maintenance access door. There wasn't an electric lock, and Emma thrilled. She pulled a small leather fold from her belt, rather like an old manicure kit (because it _was_ a reclaimed manicure kit Sterling got her for her birthday), and revealed her immaculate - if not a little wet - set of lock picks. "Fastest pick in the West," she deviously whispered before setting to work.

"Do the others know you're alive?" she heard Romanov ask Coulson.

"Just Director Fury. And you, now."

"Are you coming back?"

"I don't know. There's still work to be done."

"Barton's going to throw a fit, you know. It really...it really messed him up."

There was a scrape of a boot sole on the concrete as Sterling shifted uncomfortably in place. "Just Barton?" asked Coulson.

"Well, Stark too. You know how he gets when people break his stuff," replied Romanov, but her voice was heavier, darker around the edges with hidden meaning. For a long time after that the only sound was of Emma's wet tools clicking in the lock. It was tricky, working with slippery hands. Then: "Do they know about Twilight Protocol?"

Coulson stubbornly repeated, "_Not_ an _option_."

With a sigh, Romanov crossed her arms and turned away. Emma felt the stare burning into the back of her neck. "Agents Sterling and Morris, you are ordered to follow Twilight Protocol in the event that I become compromised by the Red Room. If I am at risk of exposing SHIELD secrets or causing unjust harm, you have the authority to kill me immediately. Are we understood?"

Instantly Emma's hands started to shake and her heart pound, but she made herself focus. When she was recruited by SHIELD it was as a technician working for the bomb squad, disassembling defused explosives from the safety of her workspace. She'd never had to kill anyone, let along people on her own team. Signing up for field training was all her own idea. Instead of vocally agreeing she nodded while Sterling somberly said, "Yes, ma'am."

When the door finally unlocked and Emma was able to swing it open, there was a guard rushing down the basement hallway toward her, gun at the ready until he spotted the woman standing behind Emma. The deadly gleam in her poisonous green eyes, the wet hair falling around her shoulders in tendrils the color of fresh blood. He stopped himself so fast that he skidded on both feet and fell, then scrambled to run in the opposite direction.

Romanov raised her gun and shot him through the head.

* * *

2003, December

"This decade's model is calling herself Natasha," Agent Carter told Clint, when night had fallen and the Black Widow was restrained to her bed. The Bratislava SHIELD base was silent, the rainstorm having finally blown over in the last two hours. "Still a Romanov, just like all the others before her. I wonder if it's supposed to be a shot at the old Czar or something."

Clint leaned against the wall and looked through the window at the Black Widow - at Natasha. She was finally asleep and Carter had pulled her from the most immediate danger, but her condition would be considered critical until the fluid cleared from her lungs. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, not tearing his eyes away from the tendrils of red hair falling over her pillow.

"Honestly, the list of things _not_ wrong with her would be shorter," replied Carter, sighing and running a hand through her scraggly hair. "Poor girl."

Turning to her, blinking, he asked, "Girl?"

Carter shrugged. "She's about twenty-three, give or take a year. Doesn't even remember her own birthday. Looking at her, knowing everything she must have lived through, still has yet to go through and how much pain she's in, I can't help wondering if...letting her go might be kinder."

The silence in the hall seemed to stretch itself tight and thin over Clint's heart, but Carter didn't notice until he spoke up. "Right," he replied stiffly. "Because what a wasted, horrible life it must be. Can't even _begin_ to imagine how it must feel if _I_ were paid to kill people."

"That's," stammered Carter, her face flushing, "that's different, Agent Bar-"

"Why, because she's on the other team?"

The shorter woman bit her lip and cast her eyes to the floor. Then, after a moment's thought, she looked up again with rage in her face and a derisive curl to her tone. "Agent Barton, when I took Natasha Romanov through X-Ray, I found bone grafts made out of _antiquated scrap metal_ that will have to be replaced to spare her agonizing pain for the rest of her life. Several of her bones have been broken and probably deliberately reset to make her more flexible, faster...I don't even know half the science behind it.

"And she has pneumonia, and she's delirious, asking for people whose names I can't make out, maybe parents or friends. Brain scans were indeterminable but I can't help wondering if she hasn't spent half her life brainwashed or drugged. I don't even want to know what I'll find when I look at her internal organs. That is what I mean by everything she's lived through and has yet to live through, Agent Barton."

It was Clint's turn to drop his eyes in shame. "How d'you know she was brainwashed?"

"Well, _there is a computer chip in her brain_ that the surgeons can't cut out because it's covered in _decades_ worth of scar tissue," snapped Carter with a sharp look. "But still, it's only an assumption. She responds very particularly to certain phrases and requests that Stevens from Psych came up with. He repeated them to her during the brain scan and the patterns were abnormal. Obviously we're going to need to do a lot more tests to confirm, but it's really looking like, yeah, like I said, brainwashing or drugs."

After a few minutes chewing that over, Clint startled when he realized that Natasha's eyes had opened and were boring into his. They were full of hatred.

"Poor girl," he faintly echoed.

* * *

2007

Something very bad happened in Madripoor.

Coulson was certain of it. Nothing short of an emotionally or physically traumatic experience could have made his favorite agents - not to say that he had favorites, of course, it was just an expression - act so oddly. Natasha was curled into a tight ball in the back seat of the SUV and staring resolutely out the window while Clint did the same on the opposite side.

"Who broke what, and how much do I owe the hotel?" he asked from the front seat, his typical first question to ask after a mission.

Neither of them answered and he frowned. Something was seriously wrong.

He held up the silence until they were back on the Helicarrier and safely settled in his office. "Alright, does anyone care to explain what happened or do I have to start breaking bones?" he asked with one hip leaning against his desk.

"Try tasing, much more effective," Natasha muttered from her seat. They were both planted in chairs across from his desk like recalcitrant children in the principal's office.

Clint turned his head - Coulson finally got a good view of the livid bruise covering nearly half his face - and looked at her. "Tasha," he quietly said. A muscle jumped in her jaw. "Tasha, let's just-"

"I killed four people."

"You _what?_" Coulson blurted out, crossed arms falling to his side as his eyebrows shot up. "Agent Romanov, you _do_ realize-?!" He stopped himself and pressed his lips tightly together. Of course Natasha realized the implications of committing multiple murders on what began as a routine extraction, she was practically an old pro despite how young she was. He took a deep breath and looked back at her. "Was it self-defense?" he asked.

Rolling her eyes - yes, the teenager parallels were really falling into place now - Natasha looked up at the ceiling to avoid meeting his gaze. "Nope, just good old-fashioned revenge," she drawled.

He looked at Clint. "Give us a minute in private," he requested, and Clint shuffled reluctantly out. As soon as they were alone he turned on Natasha. "You understand the penalty if you don't provide a reasonable explanation for the murder of four people, Natasha."

"Another psych evaluation," nodded Natasha, staring down into her lap.

"You've never liked going in."

"Of course not; would you?"

"Then give me a reasonable explanation and you won't have to go."

"They attacked my partner _with a chair_, like those ridiculous wrestling programs Agent Torres is always watching in the communal lounge; need I more reason than that?" Natasha snapped. "We all know I'm psychotically vengeful, so let's just drop this and move on."

Coulson sighed and straightened to put both feet on the floor. "Fine. Report to HR after debriefing to schedule your evaluation," he told her.

It wasn't curiosity that drove Coulson to the agents' barracks later in the evening. It wasn't anger. Honestly, he didn't know what it was, but when he stepped down the hall just in time to see Natasha vanish into Clint's quarters alarms went off in his mind. Visits to other agents' quarters wasn't forbidden, of course, but for it to happen at this hour and after such strange behavior? He would be irresponsible _not_ to investigate.

"...see why you did it," Clint's voice said behind the door. "I told you that you didn't have to cover for me."

A chair scraped against the floor and mattress springs squeaked. "We both know another red mark in my file won't make much difference," she said, trying for casual. "Trying" was, of course, the key phrase, because as excellent as Natasha was on the job, when things involved her real feelings she was a mess. "No one will be surprised to hear I savagely murdered four people when this inevitably hits the rumor mill."

Clint noisily sighed. "When are you gonna get it out of your head that you don't owe me anything?" he asked. "You talk big about debts and how I saved your life-"

"-_spared_ my life, you _spared_ my life, I did not _need_ you to-"

"Whatever, Nat! I just wish you'd realize that you don't owe me a thing. If anything, you've saved my ass so many times that I owe you!" snapped Clint. "We've been partners for three years. I trust you with my life, with-with everything, and those assholes were going to hurt you and you have to know that I woul-"

There was a pause punctuated by a creak of the bed springs, then the definite sound of kissing lips parting. "You deserve better," murmured Natasha.

The door swung open, and suddenly Coulson and Natasha were face-to-face. Her lips and cheeks were brightly colored, eyes wide as a child's, hair askew, and Barton looking shell-shocked on the bed behind her. "I was just..." she stammered, then edged around him to escape down the corridor.

He met Clint's eye. "This had better not be a problem," he warned.

Clint shrugged, still shocked, and Coulson let the door close.


	7. Chapter 7

**Hi everyone! Sorry for the longer wait than usual, I've been doing some major edits to the last two chapters and wanted to make sure I had that finished up before I went any further. Now that that's about settled I should be posting twice a week now! Hooray!...? I do hope you're all enjoying the story, as I haven't been getting as much feedback on this as the other two, and I really rely on your judgment. Anyway, I hope this longer chapter makes up for the delay to anyone who was waiting.**

* * *

2012

Something very bad happened in Sarajevo.

Clint and Natasha were silent went they crawled into the SUV. Phil hadn't had his coffee yet and was irritated with them for being ten minutes late, but as soon as he saw Tasha's pale face and the hunted look in Clint's eyes, he knew. He knew his assets like the back of his hand, and they were hurting. "Who broke what, and how much do I owe the hotel?" he asked in his usual fashion.

"A mattress, set of sheets, deep-cleansing the carpet, and possibly therapy for the cleaning staff," Natasha listed before Clint could try lying for them. Good girl, but there was something so familiar about what she said. Even though he and Clint both set her with a look she remained unaware.

The worry in his chest, though, only tightened and grew worse when he glanced into the rearview mirror minutes later and watched Natasha lay across the back seat with her head in Clint's lap. "Okay, whatever, don't tell me," he sighed deploringly. "But you know that if something's up Fury's going to be breathing down your necks." A lie, which they both knew and didn't bother to call him out on. He sighed again and returned to facing front, shaking his head at them.

"Do you want to talk to him together?" Clint whispered.

"You do it."

And he did, later. Instead of debriefing with Hill he and Coulson met in his office. "So, are you actually going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to submit an inquiry form to my own assets?" he asked.

Sinking into the chair across the desk, the younger agent's face fell into his hands, and he sat that way for several long minutes before finding the strength to speak up. Phil had never seen him like this, so tired and concerned and frightfully, painfully sad.

"Natasha had a miscarriage," he finally said to the floor.

That...hadn't been the explanation Phil was expecting. He sank into the chair beside Clint's as something wild and dark tried to rip its way free of his chest. "Tasha was pregnant?"

The thing in his chest only became more agitated and ferocious when Clint raised his head and revealed red eyes. "We didn't know until it happened" he miserably said. "I woke up, heard water running in the bathroom, and when I looked and saw her, blood all over the place, shaking so bad...you remember Geneva, Coulson?"

"How could I forget?" he instantly replied, feeling sick at the very thought of the disastrous mission.

"Well," Clint swallowed and stared down at his hands again. "Even after that shitstorm, I've never seen Tash so shaken up. She was crying, and so, so scared, and she cried in her sleep all night after that. It..." He shook his head, "it kinda makes you wonder if it wasn't bringing up old memories or something, you know? Something the Russians did to her, or-or if she ever..."

A muscle jumped in the archer's jaw as he painfully swallowed. "Will you take care of her while I'm in Vancouver?" he asked. "I doubt Carter's gonna let her go now." His hands rubbed together, rough, calloused, world-weary, and Phil fought back a sigh. He felt too much for his assets, he knew that, but they were such small broken things. What could Phil do if he'd been drawn to their brokenness, saw the raw and aching places between their insincere smiles, and wished more than anything that he could piece them back together? He treated them like his children because no one else ever had, because they needed someone to show them that they were worth more than the bodies lying in their wake.

Phil reached into the space between them and put a hand on Clint's shoulder. "You know she can look after herself," he reminded him, "but I'll keep her updated on the job every few days."

"Okay. Thanks."

He sent Barton off on his way to Vancouver, and a week later did good on his promise to keep Natasha up to date on how the case was going. The moment he saw her it felt like being staked through the heart - this wasn't Natasha Romanov. This wasn't the woman he had swallowed down a shiver to regard when reading her case file. This wasn't even the woman he had looked on with pity when Barton dragged her in nine years ago. This was something wild, trapped in a cage of skin and screaming out to be free, to know something other than hands that stroked and fed and whipped and lashed and bruised. She leaned against the window with her forehead and fingers tap-tap-tapping the glass in a frenetic rhythm as she watched people pass on the street.

Frankly, she looked like she could use a hug, a cup of tea, and a warm blanket. She looked like she could use a parent. But Phil knew that she would never allow it, never allow another soul to see her soft underbelly, and yet in a way she already had. She let Clint in, didn't she? Let him see the vast and wild hurt sitting poised in the cleft of her ribs. It was like being allowed an all-access pass to some exclusive club, and Phil wanted nothing more than to be a part of it, to fill in those dark and empty places with something brighter, something light and buoyant that could hold her up when he and Clint weren't there, because whether she liked it or not Natasha Romanov was fragile. Not in the swooning damsel kind of way. Not in the way that made her weak. In the way that _allowed_ her to be weak. That allowed her to let other lost broken creatures like him and Clint into the gaps between her ribs and make her happy.

She finally turned to face him with that feral, raw pain in her eyes, and it was like looking into the sun.

* * *

2015

Natasha led the way through the Red Room facility's catacombs, steadier on her feet than she'd been after coming out of the lake but still not operating at her full potential. At Coulson's silent instruction Morris and Sterling rushed to flank her while he watched over them from the rear. They quietly took down any Department agent they could, but if the agents didn't go down quietly they were shot. It was inelegant, but they were in a hurry. Natasha's insides shivered at the thought of how close they were. Or it was just a fever from dehydration.

At a recognizable junction - not much renovation had gone into rebuilding the facility - she ordered, "Stop here," and used the butt of her gun to break the lock on a supply closet. She slid quickly in, ignoring the others' looks, and rifled around the shelves of syringes and drugs. Bottles upon bottles of the red drug sat innocently waiting in rows. Natasha passed them by and instead found another familiar drug. Without further ado she filled a syringe and plunged it into the meat of her thigh. At Coulson's concerned look she replied, "Just a stimulant. It's fine."

"Are you familiar with all of the drugs in that closet?" asked Coulson. "Anything useful?"

She shrugged and looked over her shoulder into the supply closet. More like a medicine cabinet. Weapons would be somewhere else. "Sure, yeah, but they all require getting within close range. We don't have time to take down every agent. Bullets would be of more..." Suddenly blackness filled her eyes and she went slack, coming to on the floor moments later with her old handler holding her against his chest. "More use."

"Just a stimulant, huh?"

Releasing what she realized had been an iron grip on Coulson's hand, Natasha pushed away from him to pick herself up with the wall for support. A faint unconvinced smile was playing on his face when she looked at him again. Thinking hard, she figured it was a combination of her concussion, the red drug made to push sleepers into compliance, and the stimulant wreaking havoc on her system. She was already feeling stronger, more alert. "We make sure Shoskatov and any sleepers who might take his place are dead," she instructed rather than replying to Coulson's question, "then we burn this place to the ground." She left no room for negotiation in her voice.

Then they forced another door and found a row of cells. The guards armed with nothing more than sticks were incapacitated and the cells peered into. Most of them were empty, except...

"Doctor Pym?"

The bedraggled man in the cell, who hadn't been heard from in five years and was long since thought to be dead, looked up at the sound of his name.

Sterling was given the task of keeping guard over Pym until they found a way out of the facility that didn't involve scuba-diving again. There was a most colorful smattering of disappointment splashed across his face as he watched them go. Natasha would have been amused if she weren't so focused on the task at hand. Poor boy, eager little hero stuck on babysitting duty while his female partner dove into the fray without him.

"Who in particular are we looking for?" Morris asked.

A lance of doubt shot through Natasha's chest. "Alexei Shoskatov," she said. Obvious. "Anyone else...I'll know when I see them."

Coulson rolled his eyes at her. "Looking for a translucent needle in a haystack, then," he sighed, "my favorite."

They crawled through the air ducts like a bad adventure film cliche, but unlike in those awful pictures they knew how to move silently, knew how to disperse their weight so the ducts didn't collapse. Natasha peered through the vents down into each room, watching for any sign of Alexei. Even with the stimulant picking up her energy, her limbs were still clumsy with exhaustion, and more than once she almost exposed them. This was taking too long.

She stopped when she looked down and saw a security surveillance room, full of screens monitoring every room of the facility, and slipped quietly down behind the guards there.

«Miss me?» she asked.

The guards turned, saw her standing there, and screamed for mercy. She didn't grant it.

Minutes later, after their bodies stopped shuddering, Coulson and Morris slipped through after her. Natasha took the microphone used for announcements and alerts. «Mister Shoskatov, you're needed in the training rooms immediately,» she announced in a poisonously pleasant voice.

* * *

"_WHERE IS STARK!?_"

Junior agents scattered like leaves at Hill's yell as she tramped down the corridor with her earpiece flashing in place. The Deputy Director had been trying to reach Stark ever since Barton shower up with his kid, Banner, and Rogers hours ago. So far there was only radio silence, which was never a good sign. He would have at least mouthed off to her once by now if he were up to anything SHIELD would approve of.

Ducking into the lab just to make sure he hadn't flown in with the Iron Man suit, Maria was just in time to spot Doctor Banner trying to take off his glasses and accidentally flinging them halfway across the room. "Doctor Banner, is everything all right?" she asked, fighting the urge to skeptically narrow her eyes. The physicist had only worked a few projects in direct affiliation with SHIELD since the Chitauri invasion three years back; it wasn't news that he didn't trust them, and even if Maria didn't have anything personally against him she sometimes wondered.

"Fine, I'm...fine," Banner murmured distractedly, staring down at his hands. When he moved to retrieve the fallen spectacles Maria noticed one of his feet were dragging slightly behind him, but he either didn't notice or didn't care, so she made the executive decision not to mention it. "And I haven't seen Tony. I, uh...heard you yelling down the hall." He sheepishly smiled before trying to tuck his glasses into his breast pocket and only succeeding on the third attempt. "If you'd like, I can call Pepper, she might know where he's gone if she hasn't been working."

A fizzling headache started to creep up her neck and into her eyes, and she pinched the bridge of her nose to stave it off. "No, that's fine, Doctor Banner; I'm sure he'll turn up when he gets hungry," she sighed.

Banner grinned and nodded his agreement. Things were a little stiff and awkward between them, especially considering she shared a name with his, Stark, and Potts' toddler daughter, but he was a good man.

"No word from the rescue team yet?" Banner asked, polite as ever.

She shook her head. "None. Though I'm pretty sure no news is considered good news on an op like this." Looking up at all the screens and instruments in the lab, wondering what Banner was doing in there to keep himself busy but not curious enough to ask, Maria allowed her mind to once again settle on the enigmatic Agent X. She hadn't been allowed to see him; only Fury had the clearance. There were very few things she didn't have the clearance to know as Deputy Director, and it grated on her nerves that this was one of them.

"I'll have someone let you know when there's news," she told Banner after a long moment of silence, turning on her heel to flee.

Two juniors passed with smiles on their faces. She glared until they sobered up. If she was going to be miserable, then everyone else could be as well.

* * *

2004, January

Whether they liked it or not, SHIELD couldn't technically keep the Black Widow - _Natasha_ - against her will. They couldn't try or convict her, not really, not with the number of governments she and her past doppelgängers pissed off over the years. Just trying to figure out which _continent_ to try her on would probably cause enough international incidents to last them all a good, long time. Secondly, since all the Widows looked alike there was no knowing of which crimes to convict this one.

That was why SHIELD insisted it would have been cleaner if Clint had just taken the damn shot and killed her, nice and quiet, no muss, no fuss. All those dead people avenged with one small, sick body.

When she was well enough to survive on her own, when the drugs were purged from her system and her mind clear (Psych had had a field day with her; Agent Maas was halfway through a new doctorate thesis already), Clint caught her breaking into a helicopter in the middle of the night. He didn't even _want_ to know how she got the key.

"Where you gonna go?" he asked as if they were discussing her next vacation and he hadn't just caught her in the act.

Natasha slid back to the ground with arms tightly crossed, watching him with dark unease in her eyes. "I have unfinished business back in Budapest."

"That so?"

"It is."

They stared one another down for a long time. The sun started to creep over the treetops and pink light bled into her poisonous eyes. They were just too pretty to be real, those eyes of hers. Then he thought about all the fucked up medical procedures done to make her stronger and more beautiful, the ones Carter had found written in Natasha's skeletal structure, and he swallowed back a shudder.

"Are you going to stop me, Agent Barton?" she asked with the hint of a mean smile curling her lip. Even if she was still recovering, still too thin to be considered really healthy, Natasha had proven herself to be a pretty fierce opponent. Hell, she'd been fierce when she was knock-knock-knocking on heaven's door. Clint wouldn't put it past her to be able to use her pinkie nail to impale him without breaking a sweat.

Still. No time for that now. Clint tucked his hands into his pockets and shrugged. "Way I see it, Miss Romanov, you got two options," he said. "First option: you take that helicopter and you get the hell outta Dodge. You go back to your old ways, keep on killing innocent people, and SHIELD will be on your tail again before you can count to ten. I won't be there to save you next time, either."

An early morning breeze rushing through the trees swallowed the sound of her attempt at laughter. "You didn't _save_ me, Barton. You_ failed_, and are trying to make yourself into a hero regardless," she scornfully dismissed.

"Option two," he continued as if she never interrupted. "You stay here." And yeah, if that didn't make her unaffected façade slip a little then he was a monkey's uncle. "You come on to SHIELD. Start a new life. The pay's a helluva lot better, I'll tell you what."

Then, because it looked like she was going to protest or roll her eyes again, he blurted out, "You know what I saw in that alleyway, Natasha? I saw that that bastard had it coming, sure, because he was the one who had you killing babies and old women in their beds at night for enough money to last, what, three days? A week, tops? The guy who made you so _sick_ with grief that you couldn't eat or sleep? But I saw something else, too, 'cuz I see a lot better from a distance.

"I dunno where it all went wrong for you, Natasha, but you musta been pretty desperate. Freelance work isn't as easy to get as it used to be so you took what you could. Killing Kozakov wasn't just killing a sick bastard; he was your last shot, and you killed him anyway, because he wanted you to needlessly take down another civilian. You got a lot of red in your ledger, sweetheart. SHIELD can help you wipe it out."

Storm clouds formed in her eyes as she regarded him, her hair floating like bloody strands of spider's silk in the breeze. Her face was pinched, withdrawn and hardened, yet Clint knew he struck a nerve because of that shadow in her poisonous eyes. Probably she was clever enough to evade SHIELD for another decade if she did decide to go back to her old ways. Probably she was remorseless enough not to care about all the red in her ledger. Clint could have gone home weeks ago, left her to Carter and the Bratislava base's mercy, but he felt like he wasn't quite finished with Natasha Romanov yet. Maybe he'd regret sticking around for the rest of his life, maybe he'd just made an enemy...but maybe not.

"Whether I accept or not, I still have unfinished business in Budapest," she scowled with a strange sort of softness hiding in her eyes.

A grin tugged back Clint's lips, and he stepped up to the chopper. "By all means, then, let's get you sorted."

From almost the moment the helicopter landed they were being pursued by endless throes of people Natasha had managed to piss off in the past four months. There were four firefights in only 14 hours, and when Clint dared look at Natasha he found a woman changed. Gone was the sickly, pitiful creature he'd so easily been able to cradle in his arms and fear for the last time they met in Budapest, the woman whose hazy hate-filled stare would live in his memories forever. In that creature's place was Natasha, looking truly alert for the first time since Clint started tailing her all those months back, a sort of savage joy buried deep in her expressionless face. It was the kind of inanimate joy he imagined his bow might feel being picked up after a long mission with longer-range weapons. It was the joy of a tool being used for its real purpose, not needless destruction.

Finally, early on the second day and with Clint's earpiece battery dead, they found Kozakov's apartment. Natasha vanished inside and left Clint to stand guard for over an hour. Just as he began to wonder if she'd been hit by a booby trap she reappeared, seemingly unladen but looking satisfied.

"All set?" he asked, eyeing her.

She nodded. "All set."

Honestly, she was having so much fun Clint was surprised she didn't shoot him in the back of the head and jump ship.

There were two more firefights on the way back to the chopper, and outside the thing they had to wrestle another handful of free agents, all thirsty for the Black Widow's blood. "Christ, but you got a lotta fingers in a lotta pies," he grumbled, and she threw her head back and laughed. To watch her fight was like watching a dance, savage and wistfully beautiful, red hair flying like splashes of blood. If he wasn't so annoyed he might have fallen in love with her. She had one agent on the leg-up into the chopper while he took on the other one on the ground.

"How you feeling, sugar?" he called over his shoulder, only to hit his belly on the ground when Natasha threw her guy onto his back.

"Call me 'sugar' again and you'll find out," she grinned through bloodied teeth. "Stop wheezing and get in the bird, you baby."

It was the longest Clint had ever been chewed out in his entire life, the talking-to he got when they arrived back in Bratislava. Even the army had been more forgiving, and that was the _army_. It was the first time he'd seen Coulson mad. He was sure the handler was gonna pop that one vein in his forehead at long last, until Natasha showed up in the door - Carter nagging at her heels about infections and sprains - and announced her surrender to SHIELD's mercy and plea for asylum among their ranks.

"_Mind-bogglingly irresponsi_-what?" Blinking, still red in the face but cutting himself off mid-stride, Coulson turned to her in muted shock.

Natasha crossed her arms, bright hair falling in a ropey braid over one shoulder, and in that moment looked almost alarmingly young. Even 22 seemed generous. "I want to...I _need_ to start over, turn a new leaf," she said, looking at the floor. "According to Agent Barton, you can help with that. I got a lot of red in my ledger. No more needless killing."

Her mouth twitched and Carter tugged on her elbow. "Come on, you've said your bit, now back to bed; let them at it, I'm sure the measuring tape's gonna come out any second," she muttered.

"Why would they need a measuring tape to argue...?" Clint heard Natasha ask, voice fading down the hall, and swallowed back a grin at the look on Coulson's face. Natasha knew exactly how to plant a thought in someone's head, and this was no exception. That poor girl, innocent violated child soldier, so deprived of human contact she didn't comprehend even a simple joke most people half her age understood. Black Widow had the handler wrapped around her little finger.

Later that night, watching Natasha regard the parchment envelope she'd taken from Kozakov's apartment - _Remember, Natalia_, it said - and without opening it burned it, Clint couldn't help wondering if she had him, too.


	8. Chapter 8

It wasn't Alexei waiting for her in the training rooms. It was someone worse. Much worse than Alexei and a much older enemy.

Natasha held up a hand to Coulson and Morris. "Go back to the basement and get Pym," she ordered them. "There should be a weapons storage room beneath the east wing. There will be mines and remote detonators; plant them around the foundations and find a safe place. If I don't come back within half an hour, light the place up."

From one of his pockets Coulson pulled a communicator, a little damp, a little damaged, but still working, and forced her hand closed around it. She tucked it into her pocket with no intent to use it. "I hope you kill them all," he fiercely said and pulled the bewildered Morris away. Were she less dehydrated she might have felt the sting of tears in her eyes.

Taking a deep breath, Natasha pushed through the training room door. Even from this distance she could see the red drug's lethal shine. «Nice to see you, Yelena,» she greeted.

Her "little sister" Yelena, pale little spider, sweet broken soldier with no weapon but the needle in her hand, grinned and charged. They met in a crash of red and gold that would have made Stark salivate in another life, all sense of their old selves, the elegance carved into their very bones, gone like the candle on a child's birthday cake. More than once she felt something burn into her skin; whether it was the needle or fingernails hardly mattered now. She bit into Yelena's hand until blood poured into her mouth, then spat it back in her eyes.

Small, slim hands wound around her throat and Natasha kicked up from where she'd landed flat on her back, trying to dislodge Yelena, who had always excelled at breaking necks. Natasha worked better with a gun in her hand, a blade, her Widow Bites, she was better at drawing the end sweetly out, the master of her craft. Suffering was an art, after all, and weren't all artists in some way or other masochists to their art? She knew suffering like the back of her hand, like bloody snow on a Slovakian battlefield, like losing a father who wasn't her father, who lied about touching her as a child to test her weaknesses, and like losing a friend who she wished could have been her father. She knew suffering like holding a dead daughter for the first and last time, like hunger and sleeping in trenches, like pneumonia and rain that never seemed to end, like an arrow through her shoulder, like the voice of a broken man abandoning his orders to save her life, because she knew now, Natasha knew she had never once been spared. She had been saved.

Yelena flipped them over and slammed Natasha's back to the concrete floor - Red Room girls didn't need safety mats, they needed to avoid falling on their heads - but Natasha used the momentum to vault Yelena over her head. They both sprawled across the cold floor before scrambling to their feet and circling one another like predators. Yelena's needle was still intact and full as they calculated the other's weak spots. The coppery taste of blood sang between Natasha's teeth.

«Where's the Red Guardian, little sister?» she asked.

Pushing yellow hair from her eyes, Yelena sucked in a breath and fisted a trickle of blood from her lip. «He doesn't want you like this!» she called back, brandishing the syringe with a disgusted expression. «Either you take your medicine or you die, Natalia. Your choice.»

It must have been right after she fled Slovakia when they injected Yelena with the serum; she was barely older than sixteen, physically. At least Natasha was able to escape that fate until she was 23. «What's behind Door Number Three?» she asked wryly. Clint had really rubbed off on her.

«There is no third door,» Yelena growled, and she dove for Natasha again.

_CRASH!_

_"That's what you think!"_

Both women spun in place as Iron Man exploded through the ceiling in a shower of debris. Natasha shielded her face and barely dodged out of the suit's way in time. Yelena wasn't so lucky, crushed and motionless under a piece of concrete. Staring at her mutilated face, Natasha flexed her shoulders with a grimace and gasped when she felt a burning pain in her leg. She looked down, expecting shrapnel, and found the syringe stuck in her leg, plunger deployed, red drug coursing through her system.

"Oh...shit, I hope that was one of the bad guys," Tony said as he regarded Yelena's body. "Looked like she was attacking you through the heat scans, anyway. Did you like the line? I've developed an algorithm for the perfect one-liners when entering an unknown situation, based on background info. How'd I do? Dramatic enough?"

His helmet tipped down when it became clear she wasn't about to answer, following the angles of her tortured body, and she imagined the face behind the mask filled with fear. "Fuck," he muttered, and whirred closer to inspect the damage. "Poison?"

Shaking her head, Natasha pulled the needle out with a grimace. "Worse," she replied. Already she could feel herself getting weaker, shutting down in preparation for a brainwashing that would never come, mind and body unraveling from one another burning away with the fire inching through her veins. Mechanical hands reached to steady her, study her, take her apart, peel her open, scoop her hollow and put someone new inside. She staggered to the ruined wall and felt herself begin to drain away with detached horror. Yes, she'd known that this hopeless mission would likely end in her death, and yet now her little prophecy was coming true and _it wasn't fair!_

"Yo, Widow, can you hear me?" Tony loudly asked but daren't come any closer. "Make a noise, kid."

What an idiot. She was at least 50 years his elder, if not more.

A red-and-blue shadow swung in from behind like a spider just as, behind Tony, another man emerged from the smoke and dust across the training room. A man in red, dark as fresh blood, stepping over debris to discover Yelena's body. Alexei made a soft wordless sound and sank to his knees beside the fallen child, heedless of the repulsors aimed at him.

A wave of crimson fury drove Natasha to her feet at the sight. «_Did you love her, comrade?!_» she howled over the blaring alarms. Only a trickle of guards came marching in to investigate, and Tony and Peter tore them down while Natasha and her ex-husband grappled for one another's throats. «Would you do anything for the Department to avenge her?! Would you sleep in trenches, and starve in the rain, even while knowing you're killing your own child?»

Hands closed around her neck and pinned her to the cracked floor. «Love is for children,» he hissed with enraged tears in his eyes. «I owed her a _debt_.»

Perhaps if she weren't so preoccupied trying to throw Alexei off of her, Natasha would have been shocked. But her muscles were giving up after days without more than a few hours' rest and now the red drug slipping through them. The longer she looked into Alexei's face the more she remembered him, the shadow of a boy slipping between trees, the laugh of a young man who interrupted her recon job to tell her how beautiful she was, secreting flowers between the Department gates. She could see shades of that boy in this man's hate-hardened face. Could feel herself remembering how to love him under the red drug's influence.

"Alexei," she gasped, hands tight around his wrists as the Department's constant programming stream was downloaded straight to her vulnerable mind. "Alexei."

This was her husband. This was her great love, lost for so long and still so beloved. They were married in a little church far away, with lengths of black ribbon around their fingers, and she loved him, and their baby was lost forever. Killed by those men she called her team. _No, no, that's not right_. She was well taken care of while she was pregnant, they protected her and shielded her from doubt when she was afraid. They imprisoned her. _No_. But the baby was stillborn in the snow. Last month? _No, it was 1945_. When was it 1945? Last month? _No!_

Alexei saw the conflict shifting through her eyes and smirked, releasing her, even helping her to stand. She loved him like she was born to it, as easily as breathing, as easily as choking on pneumonia with an arrow through one shoulder. As easily as holding a bouquet of purple carnations tied together with blue ribbon. But that wasn't...that wasn't Alexei...

"Natasha, I thought we were here to kill that guy!" a mechanical voice yelled, Stark's voice, the sound of hate and motherless children, the sound of generosity, ice in a glass, a hand on her arm, a warm light for all mankind to share, blinking them out of existence, burning them to the ground - no, no, that wasn't Tony, not anymore, Tony was good, Tony housed them and protected them and taught her how to love her child while still remaining herself. And Peter, that boy, that mutant child who could have been her grandson, with his camera and glasses and dopey smile, playing with the grown-ups in a suit much too small for the size of his heart.

She couldn't see his face through the mask, but Natasha knew how he was looking at her. It sent a bolt of pain through her chest and she hated him for it. _I don't know what's real_.

A long time ago, before Ninotchka and after the Winter Soldier, Natasha said those same words to Ivan (the monster who touched her as a little girl - no, that wasn't right, Ivan was good to her and Ivan loved her as his own, he never hurt her, it was a trick, a test of her programming), whispered with a last embrace before he was called to another mission. His hands had floundered, tried to hold on just a little longer, but already she had slipped away with another girl shifting into place behind her eyes. There was horror in his face, she remembered. Horror for what his darling child had become, and now he was dead.

She danced for the Bolshoi and they told her it was for the warmth of her parents, but there were no parents, not really, only the fabricated memories planted in her head. Yet even now a man's face - or an amalgamation of three faces - hovered in the eyes of her memory and screamed _Papa_.

«Look at me, Natalia,» Alexei commanded, and held a pistol to her forehead before addressing Stark and Parker in clipped English. "You stop killing my men, now."

They put their hands down, why, why bother protecting her? She was the enemy now - or was before - or never was, or _always_ was, was she? Fear and elation and love and hatred all swooped through her gut when the gun's barrel pressed to her brow. "Alexei," she whispered again, reaching for that face so loved.

"Natasha, don't!"

Iron Man's faceplate swung away to reveal Tony's broken, fearful expression. Peter too, he pulled off his mask, hair askew and silently pleading with her to stop. The painted smirk on Alexei's face for some reason made her shiver. "She is ours now, Stark. The Black Widow always belonged to us," he gloated, and that, no, that wasn't right, Black Widow wasn't her name, it wasn't who she was, she was Natasha, she was Natalia, she was Natalie Nadia Nadine Nerise Nancy, she was Mama, she was _how you feeling, sugar?_, she was Natasha, Natasha, _Natasha!_

The gun was slipped into her hand, its weight a comfort when her mind was burning apart at the seams. She turned to look at Tony and Peter, programming morphing their faces into something bestial, and Natasha blinked against it. Gripped the gun tight, finger hovering at the trigger, watched as the dams behind her teammates' faces cracked open and bled onto the floor, then turned on her heel and ran from the training room.

How much time did she have before her entire mind was lost?

_Enough._

Natasha ran like the devil himself were nipping at her heels. "Like greased lightnin'!" Clint would crow, would have crowed if he could only see her. If she just pushed through it like before, the red drug hadn't been directly injected into a vein, it would go slower through her system, she would have enough time to cut off the programming stream. She only had to get there, and already she could hear Alexei trailing not too far behind. Still, even wounded and drugged, she had always been faster than him.

With her free hand she caught herself on a corner to keep from slamming into the wall as she turned, then pulled out the communicator Coulson gave her. "_Phil!_" she shouted into it.

_Natasha! Sitrep?_

"Running," she gasped, and leaped forward when she felt Alexei rushing nearer. "They - drugged me. Full dose. You need to - initiate - Twilight Protocol."

_Absolutely not!_

_"You have to!_"

Hands finally closed around her hair and yanked her into the wall; she managed to block most of the force with her hands but still knocked her bruised forehead, then twisted to throw Alexei away down the narrow corridor. Time was running out, her mind unraveling and joining back together around the sight of his face. Did she love him or did she hate him? Was this the boy who tied a length of ribbon around her finger with tears in his young eyes, or the man who would murder her child without a thought?

The Iron Man suit came crashing down the corridor after them, not made for running but unable to take off in the small space, Spider Man swinging through over his head. Natasha threw herself at Alexei and slammed him into the wall as he had done to her; he scrabbled for a grip in her wet clothes and shoved back. It was impossible for the repulsors to get a good shot in at Alexei without hitting her too, yet when Parker rushed in to help Natasha practically snarled at him. "Control room," she grunted, deflecting a kick with the back of her hand and shoving Alexei onto his back.

He curled his legs, absorbing the shock and springing up again within a second, landing a blow across her jaw. The fact that he was losing didn't seem to be lost on Alexei. There was a gleam of desperation in his eyes. Even if he knew nothing of Peter Parker's intellect, everyone knew that Tony Stark was a genius who could do anything with computers. If he ate up his time fighting Natasha then Stark would get through and stop the stream, but if he diverted himself to hold off Stark then Natasha would do the same. At least she would if the programming weren't still trying it's damnedest to eat everything away.

"Find the computer-satellite connection and cut it off," Natasha continued before being slammed to the floor and crying out when the air gushed from her lungs. While gasping to get it back she forced her feet between them and kicked out into his stomach, throwing him off before his hands could close around her throat. This time he was vaulted far enough away that Stark could grab him by the collar - _you let him go_! - and throw him all the way back to the end of the corridor where they'd begun. "Destroy the...the hard..."

_You are a child of science. You are a child of God. You were made for this. Don't talk back to your fathers, selfish child. Stop crying. You are stronger than this._

"...hard drive..."

_The imperial family was fond of bears, but you are not a bear. There is a lion heart between your ribs, Natalia. You survived when all the others perished - don't mention that brat Yelena, crying like an infant because you beat her!_

Peter gripped her elbows and pulled her off the ground. Her hands itched for his neck, itched for the gun shoved into her jacket, but she sucked in a breath and shook her head and ran down the corridor instead, her head aflame.

_Do you know your mother's name, Princess? Little Czarina, marching across camp like the Grand Duchess herself!_

Down three more corridors they twisted and turned, Natasha needing to stop and catch herself from slipping away while Tony thundered up the rear. Every time the stream picked up pace in her head her body stopped, started to shut down and accept the programming, but then Peter or Tony would grab her and shake her and yell and she'd come back.

_You know they say they've found Anastasia's bones in the forest where the Czar died, but we know differently, don't we, little Czarina? She would have been, what, 28 when you were born?_

As long as she stayed awake she could retain those pieces of herself that had been stripped away...or keep away the new identities trying to cover her up. The shadows, the nesting dolls always waiting to swallow her whole.

_Lie still. Let the drug do its work and go to sleep. _

_Avant!_

The control room was at the center of the facility, as shielded from the outside world as one could get, and when they found it Coulson spoke again in her communicator. _What's going on, Natasha?_

"Found it," she mumbled, hands shaking as she tried to pry the steel panels off the walls. Then Stark did it with two mechanical fingers and she nearly sank to the floor. The gauntlets hit the floor beside her feet and Tony crouched to get a look at the wiring and panels of hardware there. Natalia had only seen this room once, in passing, when the facility was in ruins. The technology was still years out of date but new to her eyes. Her head throbbed now that they were so close to the stream's source (though it could have been the concussion) and she moaned, covering her eyes, no longer caring if the stream was destroyed or not, just for it to be over, just to sleep.

_More agents are on their way in now, just hold on_, Coulson's voice reported.

There wasn't anything to hold onto but his voice.

_Who are you now?_

"...What?"

_Right now, Natasha, who are you? What do you do, who's your family?_

Just the fact that she had to think, and think hard, said volumes about her mental state. Tony swore as he burned his hand on a piece of circuitry and moved instead to the computer monitor, visor up. "JARVIS, can you hack it now? Insert bug 417, critical settings, wipe it all out," he ordered.

"I'm...a ballerina..." Natasha whispered, then at Peter's alarmed look quickly added, "No, that's wrong."

_It's alright. Try again_.

A wounded cry crawled out of her throat, and without a thought for how it would burn she plunged her hands into the enormous hard drive's circuitry. Her muscles seized around a bunch of wires and Peter had to pull her out with them still clutched in her fingers. She didn't know. She didn't _know_ anymore.

_Stop crying,_ another voice whispered.

"I am stronger than this," she recited like a child's nursery rhyme, held up by Peter's hands and her own stubborn will.

Coulson's voice was instantly replying, but she couldn't make out the words anymore.

_I am so tired. Please, Papa, I'll do all my chores if you just let me sleep a little longer._

"There!" Tony cried moments later, but he needn't have bothered.

All of it, the hundreds of voices all clamoring for her obedience, the ones and zeroes lining together to rewrite her recollections, the blood and choking fearful shadows that hovered over her all her life, to the point where she hadn't even known they were there, were gone, gone, all of it, gone. The undercurrent that dragged at her ever since she was a little girl was gone, her mind was completely clear to the point of pain, unbelievable pain shooting across her synapses, into her eyes and ears and nose like she was being crushed from the inside by the swelling bowed over to clutch at her head, screaming into the void until a pair of thin arms wrapped around her.

There was another great scream of inconceivable agony from far away, a man's scream, Alexei's, they all turned in search of the source, and the world around Natasha went dark.


	9. Chapter 9

1945

The baby started halfway through the wild, but Natalia was trained to push all discomfort aside for the sake of a mission. It didn't even hurt that badly or that often right away, not enough to make her gasp until after she found the family in their doomed little cottage and pulled them back out into the wood. A young couple and their little girl, waiting out the invasion in their abandoned village.

They were halfway to a wood shed to keep out of the snow when Natalia couldn't stop herself falling, catching herself in the snow with one hand while the other held her stomach, and young Zora gasped when she wrenched open Natalia's shapeless coat. «You're having a baby?» She murmured something to her husband, who pulled out his pocket-watch with an anxious look.

Natalia shook her head and strands of hair came loose around her eyes. There was blood in the snow beneath her. «No,» she said, a refusal, a protestation, a plea. «Not now. Not here...» She had never felt her own age, even when she was a child, but as fear wound its way to the pit of her stomach with the pain coiling there she shook and wanted nothing more than to cry for a mother she'd never known. A small keening sound crawled from the back of her throat. Zora showed her how to breathe, and despite the passing threat rushed them back to the cottage.

The baby was in the wrong position and Natalia too weak for an easy birth; were she alone in the wilds, she knew that she would have died. As it were it was eighteen hours in the cottage before, with a scream muffled in a knotted length of cloth, her baby finally slid from her into the young midwife's hands. Not a sound came from the babe's mottled blue lips no matter what Zora did, and finally with a mournful sigh she shook her head. «I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can do. She's stillborn.»

«Sh...she-?»

The baby was loosely wrapped and placed in Natalia's arms with care, despite the fact that nothing could hurt her now. She looked like Alexei. Natalia didn't cry, didn't allow herself the luxury until something quietly snapped, and she looked up to find Harald taking a photograph of her beautiful despair with tears in his dark eyes. It wasn't customary for men to be present at births, but with the difficult circumstances and the army advancing closer every hour this was hardly a customary birth, and Zora needed the extra hands. Or rather Natalia needed one to hold.

«We'll take care of her,» promised Harald, kneeling at her side. «I'll find the lovely place in the forest where wild roses grow higher than your head.» Tears finally stung and streamed silently from her eyes as she regarded her baby, her precious dead child who looked so much like her beloved dead husband, brushing a finger over the cold swell of her cheek, watching her hair curl in russet whispers, loving someone who could never love her back. «Will you name her?»

A million different names flew through her mind at once, ones she imagined might have been her mother's or grandmother's, the names of other Red Room girls, a thousand curses, and instead of using any of them she looked around herself, at the house, and said, "Rose."

«A Western name?»

Hatefully wiping the tears from her cheeks, she forced a laugh. «The East hasn't done me any favors.»

She left the next morning, though Zora wanted her to stay in bed resting for a week. It was unbearable to stay in that cottage another minute, not with Zora and Harald's little daughter tip-toeing around trying to be quiet. Zora kissed her forehead in a motherly way even though she couldn't have been more than 24. «Please be safe,» she pleaded. «Come back to us someday, when the war is over.»

«It will never end,» replied Natalia, shouldering her rifle and marching into the wild yet again.

* * *

2015

"Try to stay awake, Agent Romanov."

"N...no. 'm tired."

"I know you're tired, but you need to stay awake, you've been concussed and drugged. What-?" the voice hovering over her cut off and started murmuring to another; in that time Natasha rolled onto her side and tried yet again to go to sleep for the first time in days.

A second pair of hands pulled her onto her back and a new voice accompanied them. "Natasha Romanov, you stay awake or I start breaking bones," it demanded, and she feebly smiled.

"You...don't scare me, Papa," she whispered, and one of the hands on her shoulders tightened. The smile dropped off her face, exhausted. "'m so tired. Please just let me sleep."

"You can't sleep, Natasha, not like this," insisted Coulson's voice as if it were from underwater. "If you go to sleep now, the drug cocktail and concussion could kill you."

She tried to shrug, shake her head, anything, but she couldn't feel her extremities anymore. "That so bad?" she mumbled. "I'm so tired, Papa, please, jus' let me go. Just let me go to sleep. It hurts."

From her shoulder, the hand moved to grasp hers. "_No_."

* * *

Clint was trying to sleep, but it was difficult. Katerina in her car seat only a few feet away was resting much easier under his watchful eye. The hum of the Helicarrier engines made his ribs feel like they were rattling loose in his chest cavity, sitting on his bunk hunched over against the wall, head in his hands. He never believed in God, not even when Mom would scream scripture from the bedroom to drown out the punctuation of Dad's fists on his and Barney's tiny bodies. Especially not then, actually. After Thor touched down in New Mexico and proved that some deities, to an extent, existed, it only served to make Clint more wary of faith and asking disembodied voices other than JARVIS for help.

But Katerina yawned and made a sleepy sound, and Clint started praying that Natasha would come home. She didn't even have to be in one piece, he bargained with an imaginary savior, just alive. Just back where she belonged.

It was either very late or very early by the time he dozed off and was being roused again by Bruce pounding on the door. "Clint! They found her; they're choppering in now, it should be any minute," he gasped, hand tangled in his hair. "And get this: Tony, Peter, and Sharon are with the team who were sent to get her. I'll stay with the baby, you go."

Clint scrambled off the cot and grabbed Bruce's shoulders; the poor skinny guy almost toppled right over. "Did they say how she is? Is she hurt? She okay?" he asked, trying not to crush him.

"They didn't say, I'm sorry, but they'll be back any minute."

With a barely-audible word of thanks, he squeezed past Bruce out the door and ran. Fury and Hill were already waiting at the landing pad. "Is the team coming in with her?" he asked, and Fury gave a terse nod.

"Barton, I think perhaps you ought to prepare yourself for-" Hill began, but her voice was drowned out when the chopper suddenly roared up from below. Rather than waiting to hear what she had to say, he rushed back from the pad and shielded his face from the wind. His hand was still up when dark figures jumped out of the helicopter, silhouetted by the pink pre-dawn sky.

One of them was bearing something in his arms, something red, something that made his heart jump and seize. Nat. "_Hey!_" he shouted, running to meet them. "Give her to me, I'll take her, just give her-"

"I've got her," the other man brushed him off, running full-tilt past him into the Helicarrier's shelter.

For a minute it felt like his hearing aids had been switched off, nothing but the rush of air yawning through him as it sank in where he'd heard that man's voice before. His mouth formed the name but he couldn't make himself audible. "Wait..._wait!_" His feet moved of their own accord and the next thing he knew he had the faceless agent by the shoulders, pulling and slamming his back into the wall, hands braced to catch Natasha if he dropped her. She was completely boneless in Coulson's arms.

They met eyes for a long moment, and the past days' fear and anger that had been swallowed by relief was all burned away with a righteous, unreasonable anger. "Do you have _any idea_," he furiously rasped, every word slow and deliberately chosen, "what you put us through? Do you have any idea what you fucking _dying_ did to us?! We grieved for you! _For four years we grieved for you and you couldn't even tell us!_ Do you have any idea how fucking _bad_ it feels to lose someone as important to us as you?!"

"As a matter of fact, _I do_," Coulson quietly snapped, never tearing his eyes away from Clint's. "Except _you_ had the luxury of moving on. Now, if you do not let go of me right now, there is a high likelihood that your wife is going to _die_, so I suggest you _let go of me, Agent Barton_."

Clint's eyes traveled back down to Natasha's face, white as a sheet and her eyes flickering rapidly beneath their lids, her bloody clothes, the burns on her hands, and released Coulson's shoulders. The senior agent rushed away without another word, Clint hot on his heels. Carter ran in from the pad moments later.

"We took a sample of the red drug from the facility," a junior agent announced, bottle in hand. "I think Sterling got the stimulant she used too. That's...that's good, right? That means they can _fix her?_"

Carter took the bottle with a nod before turning to other medical agents and barking orders. They scattered like cockroaches in bright light. "She has a seriously aggravated concussion and we can't keep her awake because of the drug cocktail, but we can't take her in to surgery to repair any damage because we don't know how the red drug and that mystery stimulant will mix with anesthesia until it's been analyzed...this is a nightmare but it brings back fond memories, huh, Barton?"

"How about you stop reminiscing like we're at our high school reunion and fix her?" Clint suggested sharply before moving to sit beside Natasha's gurney.

That got him a smack on the back of the head. "I get that you're upset, but you don't get to talk to me like that," she sternly said, and turned away to discuss getting the drug to lab.

Coulson sat across from him, hands neatly folded in his lap as if waiting for a bus. They met eyes over Natasha's prone figure and for a long time said nothing. Clint was still angry, but the reasonable side of him knew it was for all the wrong reasons. It was very likely that Coulson had had no choice in the matter anyway; if SHIELD needed a dead agent for an undercover mission, and one was believed to be dead by the rest of the world anyway, it followed that they would use that agent. Didn't mean it was right, but it made sense.

"You know, uh," he awkwardly said once Natasha had been stabilized and was resting under careful observation. "I was just yellin' because...you dying and stuff, that. That really messed her up, y'know? She really could have used your help the past few years, things have been rough."

"Clearly," quipped Coulson, but there was a faint smile curling his lip. "You know she said as much about _you_, right?"

He tried to look annoyed at that when all he wanted to do was hear Natasha tease him for being such an idiot. Yeah, but I'm your idiot, he would tell her, and they would laugh and Phil would laugh and everything would go back to normal. But Natasha was sound asleep, and Phil wasn't Phil anymore, he was Agent X or something stupid like that, and Clint was a dad. Nothing would ever be normal again, but that was kind of okay because normal meant a boring and predictable death.

"You always knew what you had to do," Coulson said after a while, voice soft, and Clint wasn't sure if he was the one being addressed or Natasha. "No one ever told you. You had the resolve, even then. Nor were you afraid of the dark, or what waited for you there. But sometimes...sometimes, I wish you had been."

Swallowing hard against what that was supposed to mean, Clint shook his head. "You know that you couldn't have protected her from this," he muttered. "You aren't her _dad_, Coulson. Or mine, for that matter; you aren't even that much older than me."

"Does that really matter in the end, Agent Barton?"

No, he supposed it didn't.

When it became clear that Natasha wouldn't wake from her stubborn rest any time soon Coulson released her hand. "Director Fury tells me that a lot has changed since I've been gone," he tactfully said. "Strike Team Delta's had a few major adjustments and...additions."

"If you're trying to bring up the fact that Tasha are married and have a kid now, you're doing a piss-poor job of it," Clint rolled his eyes. "Her name's Katerina. Kate or Katya, for short." He looked up to find Coulson closely watching, face impassive but eyes bright. "She just turned a month old this week, the day before Nat left."

The very thought was enough to make him indignantly bristle again, staring down at Natasha's burnt hands just as another gurney was wheeled into the infirmary behind them. "Come on, let's get out of the way for a while and I can get Katie outta Bruce's hair," he added, nodding to the door. Before they left he leaned down and pressed a kiss to Natasha's brow, smoothing back her hair and stepping out with a slap to Coulson's back.

What a sweet child, Katerina. Though she was awake she hardly made a peep around the rubber piece of her bottle as Clint gestured for a very befuddled Bruce to pass her to Coulson. He felt only a little alarmed and uncertain of himself when he took the baby in the crook of his elbow, so tiny and fragile yet so, so heavy with meaning, but Clint stayed close at hand and helped him adjust the bottle so she wouldn't swallow air. Katerina's big blue eyes shone like stained glass in the overhead light. "She looks like her mother," he remarked.

"Don't let Tasha hear you say that," weakly joked Clint. Bruce quietly slipped out to give them time alone, muttering to himself about death and disappearances. "She doesn't like it. I dunno why."

Coulson looked up from one of Katerina's red wisps of hair - it all sort of tufted together on top like a little mohawk - and met Clint's eye with a frown. Of course he knew why Natasha might be averse to having her daughter compared to her in any way, but it made him feel like someone had taken a rusty shovel to the inside of his chest - again. They deserved better, the lot of them.

"Well," he sighed after a few minutes, "she's beautiful, regardless of her father's contribution to the gene pool."

"If you weren't holding my only kid I'd smack you one, asshole."

They shared a tense not-quite-smile, exchanging measures of quiet desperation.

Tony, Steve, and inexplicably Pepper, all barred from the infirmary and so stalking the halls to keep busy, were waiting in the corridor with arms crossed, staring incredulously at Coulson when he and Clint emerged. "Hold your applause," he deadpanned.

Crossing his arms and rolling his eyes at the ceiling, Tony snorted. Pepper shot across the hall and flung her arms around Coulson in a hug. "I am _very angry_ with you for lying to us," she thickly said, but her hand kneading small circles between his shoulders said otherwise. Coulson's eyebrows sat high on his forehead as he tentatively hugged her back. "But you're home now. You're safe and that's what's important."

"Didn't realize this was home," Coulson mildly replied, and Tony coughed something that sounded like _bullshit_. He hid a smile in Pepper's hair.

* * *

"I don't understand," Natasha said early the next morning, looking through one of the closed-off patient rooms' window. "Why wasn't he taken down?"

"Because clean-up was put in the hands of an inexperienced junior agent who had never killed before," replied Carter distastefully. "He didn't put up a fight, not even a little bit. They found him in a collapsed air-vent, conscious, just lying there. Ever since they found him he's been catatonic. Psych'll be around soon to see what's up. Any ideas?"

Natasha put her hands lightly against the window, forehead touching the glass. Alexei's eyes were open but glassy, staring up at the ceiling, mouth slightly agape. "A few," she replied as she watched him. The emptiness behind his stare looked so disturbingly familiar, but she couldn't place her finger on why. She reached for the door without thinking and Sharon stopped her.

"You are _not_ going in there until Psych's seen to his brain. Go back to bed. I think Clint's bringing the baby by - but remember not to-!"

She shuffled away. Holding Katerina wasn't allowed with her concussion unless she was sitting down, so she crawled back into bed and waited, thinking about Alexei. When the Russians inserted her chip and programmed her for the first time she was 11 years old, too old for their tastes, but there had been glitches in the coding that made two girls go insane and kill themselves.

From the moment her chip was activated, combined with the previous doses of red drug and brainwashing, all traces of the child Ivan rescued from a burning house in Stalingrad were gone. Except for the times Ivan came to visit, when it broke open cracks to the human mind still breathing under lines of code. No longer a child, too many operations and doses had seen to that, but capable of independent thought, reason, and dissent. Capable of want. The programming made her fall in love with Alexei, but the cracks made her love the unborn baby that programming would have made her despise.

When she ran from them in 1945 she used those cracks, rode on the tails of her grief, and pushed the programming back. She thought of Ivan, and of the day he taught her to hunt, of his warm cottage and the young family who saved her life in the same place where she would have killed them. It kept her tethered to reality, to herself, until James and the serum lay thick over her like a fire blanket. Always there had been the programming, but she had learned how to live with it and function and even almost forget.

Now that it was gone, even though it was a foreign presence, Natasha felt like an intrinsic part of herself was missing. It was there for almost as long as she could remember, something to fall back on that she didn't even notice until it was gone. She didn't miss the constant war with her own psyche, but she was a little closer to understanding what Coulson meant all those years ago with the nesting dolls metaphor.

_Did you ever consider that they took the bigger dolls, and left the smallest one? The deepest one down? And then just replaced the outer dolls with the things you don't recognize?_

Was this who she was at her innermost, then? Exactly who _was_ she now?

A few minutes later Clint arrived with Katya huddled against his shoulder, smiling to see her awake. "How you feeling, sugar?" he grinned. "You up for some company? Because I know a pretty little girl who's awful sore to see her mama."

"Is that so?" she replied, and felt her eyes widen when Katerina turned her head, looking around for the source of her voice. Natasha reached out her arms and took the baby for the first time in countless days, immeasurable relief swelling in her gut, and when Katya looked up at her, her lips pulled back into a gummy, toothless smile.

Her heart thundered in her chest, and she and Clint both had to catch their breath. "She just smiled," he needlessly stated. "Bruce and Tony and I've been making goofy faces and tickling her all week, but you have her for two seconds and she's smiling. Of fucking course." He didn't really sound very angry at all, though, climbing into bed beside her with a contented sigh.

"So, Missus Barton, you just took down major players in the organization that ruined your childhood and prevented them ever rebuilding, your name is cleared of all murder charges now that the SHIELD babies found their records in clean-up, Stark's lawyers are descending on the Department as we speak, you managed to drag Phil Coulson kicking and screaming back from the dead, and you're home in one piece with your ridiculously charming husband and our perfect, safe, apparently now _smiling_ daughter; _what will you do now?_"

A microphone mimed out of his hand was shoved in front of her face, and she finally tore her stare away from Katerina's smiling mouth long enough to roll her eyes at him. "I could eat," she shrugged, and found it easier to curl her lips into a smile when her mind no longer fought itself at every turn.


	10. Chapter 10

Only one night of observation left before Natasha would be able to go home, and she allowed herself to be hopeful. Coulson was back for good. Any loose ends from his mission were ones that could be handled by those he left behind. It didn't immediately occur to Natasha to wonder if he left behind a heartbroken lover; he seemed the type but she had never thought of him that way. When Psych came to examine Alexei he responded in the most minor ways, eyes flickering, turning his head, sighing if they asked him to speak. There was something seriously wrong with him, and she was brushing closer to the truth of it.

She slipped into his room once Psych was gone and Sharon returned to her post, sitting delicately at the edge of the bed. "How old were you when you were programmed, Alexei?" she softly asked. "Three? Four? Too young to know anything but that _itch_, I would guess. There's nothing left of the child you used to be, or at least nothing salvageable, and without that you can't rebuild. You're an empty gourd.

"I'm...sorry. I'm sorry this happened to you." Her voice constricted more the longer she spoke, remembering Natalia, still loving a wild boy in the woods with a deep-buried corner of her heart. She stayed longer, said more, but hardly remembered a word of it.

How must it feel, she wondered, to know that nearly everything you've ever felt was fabricated? She used to think she knew, but now that the data stream was gone and there were still pieces of herself left, still memories and emotions and hopes and wants, she wasn't so sure anymore.

It was only reasonable that Alexei was kept restrained, a danger to himself and others, but when Natasha looked down at him to say goodbye she saw that one of the cuffs had come loose, his arm free. She didn't say anything, if only because he could have throttled her a dozen times while she was there but didn't. Maybe she felt sorry for that caged bird. Hours later her sleep was interrupted by medical agents all trying to rush into his room at once, crashing into one another and falling back like a tide. She didn't have to ask to know that Alexei had killed himself, only rolled over and stared at the wall until the sun came up.

* * *

Sitting alone in her bunk, Emma smoothed out the creases on her clean fresh jeans and looked up when she sensed another presence hovering in the door. "Hey," she said, and Sterling nodded. His expression was stormy and arms were crossed as he regarded her. After a few moments she looked back down at her knees. "You're mad."

"I'm not mad, just...confused," admitted Erik. "You get bumped up a clearance level, and I have to go back to Basic? That doesn't make any sense, I did just as much as you did but you get all the reward?"

A million things rose up in Emma's mind at that, brow furrowing against her will, and before she could muster up an excuse or meaningless platitude found herself shaking her head. "You didn't do as much, though," she blurted out, and a blush rocketed up her face. "I-I mean, you did, sure, yeah, you did your share, but...come on, dude, shit happens."

"Yeah, to you, because you've got tits!" snapped Sterling like it had been battering at the boundary of his mind since they came back from the mission. "Seriously, it's so stupid! We did equal work, but if I were to get a promotion then SHIELD would be full of sexists, so people with potential like me get shoved aside for the sake of political correctness. It's misandry, that's wha-"

"Are you kidding me?!" Emma blurted out. "You-!" A wordless noise of pure rage crawled out her throat into the air, her hands curled into claws. "Get out. Now. Or I will punch you so hard in the balls your grandkids'll be infertile."

Silently fuming, Sterling spun on his heel and stormed off. He wouldn't speak to her again for a very long time, and it wouldn't take too long at all for Emma to get over it. She would be too busy with her new promotion, pay raise, and torrid affair with one of the custodians to notice his sour looks across the mess hall.

* * *

As with Coulson's pseudo-death, the full reality of her new lease on life didn't hit Natasha until months after the fact. In order to keep a more watchful eye over his assets, Phil kept an office and a small apartment in the tower (Tony offered him his own floor and he politely declined). Peter had taken up permanent residence with his aunt in what used to be Natasha's apartment; May discovered his secret identity when he accidentally fell asleep in his suit after a long fight with the Doombots. She was safer in the tower anyway.

Natasha lived her life. She slid back into life with the Avengers, watched her daughter grow a little more every day, took down minor governments in her spare time, celebrated her third anniversary. Then it washed over her like a tidal wave, the realization, the grief, the unbearable guilt, pushing down on her lungs and forcing her into hiding before it all rushed into her dark and empty spaces to crush her. When no one was looking she slid away as the memories and epiphanies piled on her like stones, reliving the programming to fill the blanks in her mind.

When Steve stepped into the training rooms on a completely unremarkable, maybe a little cloudy, Tuesday, it was to find Natasha at one of the punching bags, apparently trying to beat the inanimate object to its metaphorical death. Several of her knuckles were burst and bloody but she didn't stop. It was inconclusive whether she'd even heard him come in.

"We all burn," she was whispering to herself, breathless, face red, silent tears slipping down her cheeks. "We burn in fire...we burn in blood...we burn in dreams and it never ends, dreams never end..."

He took a few steps closer and dropped his gym bag with an audible thud, hoping to rouse her from the reverie. It was like she didn't even notice what she was saying, words from someone else's mouth, eyes distant and voice slurred with exhaustion, but she just kept going, kept beating away at the bag between words, between heartbeats, gasping for air but still going.

"You would not want them to, not if it means forgetting. You can never forget, you, who are all that is left. So remember, Natalia: we are born in fire."

"Natasha?" he cautioned another step.

"_Again_ and _again_," she sobbed with vicious hits to the bag. Blood streamed down the vinyl casing. "You would live it all _again_, no matter...how much it..._hurts_."

Despite the high chance of bodily harm Steve gripped her by the shoulders and pulled, immediately shifting to protect himself when she spun to attack. A scream echoed over the walls and shuddered in his heart as she continued jabbing at his torso as if it were still her punching bag, lifting both fists and slamming them onto his collarbone before he could get a good grip on her blood-slick wrists. "Natasha, stop!" he shouted, and something in her seemed to finally break. "Stop, Natasha, it's me, stop, you're okay, it's just me, you're alright."

She leaned dazedly against the wall and slid down to rest her head on her knees, bloody hands loose in front of her. It wasn't until after Steve fetched the first aid kit and cleaned her up that she finally spoke in something other than riddles. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he dismissed with a shake of his head. "I can take a few hits, that's not what I'm worried about right now. Tasha, you know you can talk to me, right? To everyone on the team?"

After a long minute she nodded. Wiped sweat from her upper lip and stared anywhere but at his face. "There were twenty-three of us, in my time at the Red Room," she rasped as if commenting on the weather. "Two of them went insane from a glitch in the data stream. Killed themselves. Seven of them died of scarlet fever, five of Diphtheria. Yelena killed two of them, one froze to death, and I killed three. And Yelena. I killed Yelena too."

Swallowing, he sat back on his heels and silently counted. "That's only twenty-one," he pointed out, gently.

"Alexei was the twenty-second, I just didn't know it until more recently," Natasha replied, and he felt her unmasked shudder all the way down to his bones. "I'm the only one left. James - Bucky - he didn't come until later, was never really one of us. Even if we all killed each other in the end, there was such a bond between us, a kinship, none of us had real families, we were all orphans or stolen from our beds, and I'm all that's left. I'm the only one left and I don't even know who they really were."

If that wasn't a feeling Steve knew like the back of his hand, then he was a monkey's uncle. He awkwardly scooted on the mats until he was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Natasha, her sweat sticking to him, her breath still echoing off the walls. "When it hurts, you know you're alive," he said simply. "And as long as you live, they live, and when you die, they die. All you can do is live well, remember them, and make your life count so theirs weren't in vain. You're stronger than this, Natasha. You _survived_."

Quietly and without warning, her hand gripped his tight then released. The charge in the air faded.

* * *

_Love is for children. I owed her a debt!_

She woke up gasping, fists clenched in the sheets and sweat stinging her eyes, the final screams of Ninotchka, Drakhov's daughter, her once-friend and would-be lover still ringing in her ears. _Sankt Peterburg. You traitorous bitch. I loved you._ Natasha tortured and murdered her, shot her in the nape of her soft sweet-smelling neck even though she had give up all the information she had, the ghost of cold blood itching on Natasha's fingers.

Sitting up beside her, Clint clumsily put in one of his hearing aids to blink into the dark. "You okay?" he asked, and she shook her head. Took the hearing aid out again for him. Laid against his chest and whispered names of torn down men and women until she lost count, couldn't recall them all for their volume. The guards at the Red Room had been so afraid of her, screamed in terror at her face or the sound of her voice; what stories had they been told? The story of a woman who went mad and betrayed her country, or a simpler, deadlier story of girls and wolves?

* * *

Postpartum depression, Psych said. Anxiety. Post-Traumatic Stress. Tried to put her on pills but she flushed them down the toilet at her earliest convenience. She was Natasha Romanov. Just because there was emptiness in the place where a data stream used to flow didn't mean she no longer had a lion heart between her ribs.

"I hate them," she heard Clint telling Coulson, could imagine his arms swinging through the air with vehemence while their reinstated handler mildly smiled and shook his head. "The things they say about her, those-those-!"

"The things they say about her are slanderous gossip," Coulson patiently replied. "We know Natasha. We know who she is and what she needs to get through this. They don't. We need to trust that she'll tell us when she needs us."

"Yeah, I know, but..." Clint trailed off with a frustrated sigh, and Natasha decided to spare him by stepping in. He looked up at her and smiled. She nodded.

From her carrier in the corner Katerina grunted in her sleep, and Natasha felt a sudden sort of vertigo when the thought _That beautiful girl came from me and now she is across the room we are separate I miss her I want her back let her curl back in the space under my heart I'll keep her safe_ floated across her mind. Then she blinked and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'm all done for the day. Want me to take her home?" she asked, voice sounding distant to her own ears. She wasn't allowed to actually work until Psych cleared her; when she returned she would be given a new team to handle to avoid further conflicts of interest, and Coulson would handle Clint and Torres.

The edge of Coulson's mouth twitched as he stood, straightening his tie. "I think I'll join you," he offered. "Barton still has paperwork to complete."

Clint could be heard grumbling all the way out the door as they left, Katerina's carrier hanging from each of their hands between them. "You've probably heard the news about the orphanage," she said in a low voice as they stepped out the ground base doors.

The fine lines around Coulson's eyes deepened even though he didn't say a word. They all knew. Despite the Russian government's best efforts to keep it quiet, nothing could hide from the unstoppable combination of Tony Stark's lawyers and SHIELD. The Department had been working behind everyone's backs to restore the Soviet Union to its former glory, and that included another sleeper cell of child soldiers. Under the guise of running an orphanage, the same medical experiments that had been performed on Natasha as a child were being forced upon 30 little girls and 10 boys, all intended to be held until they were old enough to move to the Red Room facility and have their chips inserted.

"I want to do something for them," Natasha softly said. "They're my brothers and sisters."

Under the pretense of adjusting his half hold on Katya's carrier, Coulson's fingers brushed against hers. "No one's going to stop you," he assured her. "It's not too late to help them find their families, if they weren't really orphans. Hill tells me that the lead investigator found records dating back to the turn of the century."

That, Natasha hadn't known. She met Coulson's eye with her heart in her throat, the implications making fear bleed down into the pit of her stomach.

Agent Sitwell and a small stack of files, yellowed and fragile with age, were waiting for her in the kitchen when she woke up the next morning. "Officially, I was never here," he nodded and strode out again. Natasha sat at the kitchen table and stared at the file folders for a long time, seeing that not only her file but Ivan and Bucky's were there. She set Bucky's aside to give him if he ever came back from his soul-searching across the country, then opened Ivan's. Read about where he was born, his parents, where he went to school, little things he never had the chance to tell her because little girls didn't have the thought to ask. The wife and son he lost in Moscow only weeks before saving her. Ivan had a life before her, a whole life ripped away.

_You, who are all that is left_, a voice whispered in her ears, and touched her file with the pads of her fingers. She could learn her parents' names. If she had siblings. She could have relatives, cousins or the children of cousins, who were still alive. But what would she have in common with them now? Natalia Romanova was an impossible dream, a fictional child who only lived now in the memories of an old cottage lifetimes away. Knowing her mother's name would not return a stolen childhood. Knowing the place where her father grew up would not fix parts of her broken away from humanity so long ago.

Instead of opening her file she tucked it away in a safe place, to look at on another day. That day, Natasha was content to be exactly who she was, rather than depending on dead parents' names to determine who she was supposed to be.

* * *

"Here's how this is going to work," Natasha announced, heart thundering like it was caught in her throat as she addressed her team, all in full regalia for the occasion (except Tony and Bruce, who were looking impressive enough in well-tailored suits). Steve put her at point for not the first time, but no other mission had been quite this important before. "Find a translator and be kind to them; they're sacrificing a lot to be here today. Then talk to the kids, try to find out if they remember their parents' names. If not, take their photograph around to the parents waiting outside. You need to ask them for two forms of ID and any identification they might have for their child before moving them on to the next step. It is imperative that we do not let the parents in with the children until we are absolutely certain they're being truthful, understood?"

The team nodded and split up. Most of the Department's children hadn't been in captivity long enough not to recognize the Avengers, and even if they didn't they were awestruck by Thor speaking the All Tongue and Steve in his colors, wondering how such important-looking people had heard of them. Natasha stepped into the throng of children and started talking to them without hesitation. She wasn't good at talking to children in any other case than this; she used to be one of them, after all, and knew them just as well as she knew herself.

Three of the eight children she spoke to were reunited with their parents by the end of the day, and the rest put on the track towards foster care. The rest of the team were having nearly as much success. It made Natasha's chest feel tight to watch. Her mind still operating in Russian rather than English, she looked up when she heard Steve sounding nervous and confused even if she couldn't immediately make out what he was saying. "...nurse or something...?" he trailed off, and Natasha hurried over. A little boy with a birthmark taking up a little over half his face was shuddering and gasping beside him, hugging himself with one arm when anyone came too close.

"Give us some space," she murmured to Steve before glancing at the boy's name tag. He had a crutch and his left leg was amputated above the knee, the bandages still bloody. «Hi, Vanya. Is your leg bothering you?»

The boy shook his head and continued shuddering, his face twisted with suppressed emotion. Tears didn't touch his eyes and Natasha almost immediately realized what was going on. «No one wants me because I'm ugly,» he told her.

«Now, Vanya, that's not true,» Natasha assured him, kneeling to meet his eye and very pointedly not touching him. «No one took you home today, uh...because I asked if you could stay in the fancy hotel with me and my friends tonight! How else do you think I knew your name? Is that okay?»

Vanya thought this option over for a long time, his mouth curled in a pained look. He couldn't have been more than eight years old, and most of the children in Natasha's time had had their first operations by the time they were seven. «Yeah, that's okay,» he said, his voice high and strained as he fought not to cry. The doctors who handled Natasha hit her when she cried until she learned not to anymore. Clearly Vanya was only a few "lessons" in.

So Vanya went with them, settled comfortably between Natasha and Clint in the back of a hired car. He colored with Steve (who asked what all the colors' Russian names were), had his leg carefully wrapped and went swimming in the hotel pool, and got to eat whatever he wanted from the room service menu with Clint watching to make sure he didn't make himself sick.

Laying in bed that night, listening to Vanya giggle as he raced Bruce up and down the hall, crutch thunking through the carpet, Clint kissed Natasha on the temple. "You did a good thing. You did a lot of good things today," he told her, and for once she felt allowed to agree with him. Vanya was put on track for foster care the next day, and when Natasha looked into his case a few weeks later she found out he was adopted, healing, and very happy. Her ledger seemed a little lighter now.

* * *

When Steve saw the team again at Christmas - he and Sharon got a house together, with a proper yard for Jamie to play and everything - he was relieved to see that Natasha looked at peace. Happy, even, scooping Kate from where the baby was crawling over her feet and kissing her until she shrieked with laughter. Maria ran past with cake smeared across her face, Bruce chasing after her, and beside the tree Clint was probably having even more fun with her plastic bow and arrow set.

"Hey, Grandpa, where's Grandma?" Tony asked. For a moment Steve thought he was being mocked yet again for being born in '22, but then noticed that no, his friend was slinging an arm around Coulson's shoulders. Phil had previously been very subtly trying to make Peter take pictures of Kate for him but still bristled at the implication.

They gathered together for a group photo an hour later, and once the timer was set, Peter joining the group with his back turned, Coulson placed a hand at the small of May Parker's back. She would never tell a soul why she blushed so prettily in that particular picture. Steve's smile stretched so wide he thought his face might split in half.

_You are the inheritor of memories_, someone once told him, but he couldn't remember who.


	11. Epilogue

**2003, December**

Some days it seemed like the rain would never end, and Natasha still wasn't sure where everything went wrong. One week, she was at her height, burning brighter than ever, successful, comfortable…then jobs stopped coming in as often. Food became scarce. She sold most of her clothes and jewelry; it would help her travel lighter, in the end. She tightened her belt and moved on.

Then came Budapest, where it started to rain and didn't ever really stop. Natasha knew she was being followed, watched by an unknown third party. She found a new contact, a man named Kozakov who needed to send a warning to one of the people who owed him money. It was a far cry from the jobs she usually did, espionage and assassinations, but she needed the money. Even if it was only enough to get her through the week. It was just one job, one job to get her back on her feet, back on her throne of lies and betrayal. It didn't matter that it was a child if it meant her survival. She would repay the debt later.

The wind howled between the notches in her spine as she wrote a bloody message above the client's bed.

Natasha collected her money, made it last for two weeks instead of one and still no new jobs. Tightened her belt some more. It started to rain again. She called Kozakov.

Months went by this way, with the eyes always watching her as she met with Kozakov, killed for him, again and again. Old, young, rich, poor, it didn't matter, he seemed to have a problem with all of them, a grudge against their children and elderly mothers, and Natasha mowed them down for a handful of coins to ease the hollowness in the pit of her stomach, a scarf as the days grew colder and darker, a scarf that cost more than a life in her hands.

She started to wheeze every time she lay flat on her back at night, her lungs filling with water like drowning. Pounds shed away no matter how much she was able to eat. There was no scale, but if she had to guess, she'd dropped to ninety pounds.

Then came another day to meet her _employer_, and so reluctant was she to go, to hear another innocent name for her to cut down, that she was hours late for their usual meeting.

It was the name of another child. "_Why?_" she asked him, in English, refusing to speak their mother tongue out of stubborn defiance until she had answers. "You're the richest man in Budapest, surely this many people can't owe you money or you'd be destitute." There was no keening edge, only quiet fury, a steely soft determination that ran between her teeth like poison.

And Kozakov smiled. His teeth were black and rotting. "It looked like you could use the money," he simply said, hands spread, laughter in his eyes. "I wanted to see how far the famous Black Widow could be carried by desperation. Tell me. Was it worth it?"

Natasha could have been sick. All of those people. All of those _children_. It wasn't killing them that burned her; it was the fact that there was no use to it, no real purpose. She was a tool of destruction, that much was certain, but tools were not meant to be handled this way. "It was," she lied, "because I have just come back from draining all your funds into my own account in Bern." A deadly smile curled over her lips, trembling and weak, before Kozakov, so easily swept up in the lie, charged at her.

* * *

Clint really hated how close together the buildings were in Budapest. All of Europe, really, it made it a hell of a time getting a decent shot at any angle, not to mention making Clint feel like he was a goddamned claustrophobic. How did people breathe out here? And besides that, he was going to need every advantage he could get on this job. If he were any less of an assassin he might have been nervous, assigned to track down one of the most infamous spies of their time.

The Black Widow. A legacy no one wanted to hear about and everyone dreaded, a series of lethal women dating all the way back to the 1940s. There was never anyone better at infiltration killing than a Widow, and never anyone more beautiful. He wondered idly if it was a prerequisite for a Widow to have red hair, or if it was just an extremely long-running coincidence that they were all redheaded bombshells. Clint had plenty of time for idle thoughts like that while he was waiting for his shot, in the pouring rain, for over three hours. If he got sick then Coulson was gonna get an earful, that much was for sure.

He might have fallen asleep or given up, but in the months of trailing this woman she had passed this spot to meet a contact once a week, every week. Today, of all days, she was late. Not by much, but enough for him to wonder if something happened. The contact, guy by the name of Kozakov, had shown up and was waiting with much less patience than Clint. It was like he knew today was the big day, too.

Clint's eye caught on a shiver of movement in the very edge of his scope's peripheral and adjusted to get a better view. It was the Widow, alright, but there was something about her that seemed different from the past weeks when he'd been watching her. Her clothes were different, for one, like she never came home from a rough night on the town. She was thin as a rail, now that he could see so much of her, and walked unsteadily toward Kozakov. Clint focused on her face and realized she had been getting thinner for weeks, covering it up beneath thick layers in the past.

They exchanged words that he couldn't catch - probably wouldn't matter even if he did, since he didn't speak Russian - and then Kozakov charged the Widow. She shifted to the side and brought him down with his own momentum, shoved him face-first into the brick wall and dragged to tear at his skin.

_Barton, do you have a shot?_ Coulson asked in his ear.

"Nah, she and Kozakov are fighting," he easily replied. "This guy might get the job done for me; Widow's really let herself go."

She shoved Kozakov away and pulled a knife from her belt before he could rush her again. Lashing out at him, snarling silently from that distance, Widow fought like a caged animal. It was nothing like the finesse he had witnessed in the months past or heard through the rumor mill since before SHIELD recruited him. It was sloppy, too passionate and full of anger to let in any of her full potential, but it made Clint wonder what must have happened to throw her down this path.

The knife hit the alley floor and Widow went down beside it, pinned with Kozakov's arm across her collar. He said something to make her shudder and struggle beneath him, the circles under her eyes blurred by the pouring rain, and the water was the only thing that saved her when Kozakov's hand slipped on her shoulder. She twisted her hips and threw him off. With his body sprawled beside her she got up, leaned over him with her hands digging into his shoulder joints like claws, whispered something in his ear that made him go white, then crushed his windpipe in one hand, ignoring his thrashing and struggling even when it led to keep gouges in her skin from scrabbling fingernails.

Kozakov died slowly, his popping eyes looking right into the Widow's as she flexed her fingers around his throat. Blood slipped out from beneath her fingernails, running down into her knuckles to the pavement, and she shuddered as death settled over him like a lazy lover. His eyes continued to stare even after he finally stopped breathing.

Then the Widow slumped against the alley wall and screamed into the storm. Even though he knew he was too far, Clint could almost imagine he heard the cry, her eyes screwed shut in agony. A few moments passed, then the Widow pressed both hands over her face and stood in one ungainly movement.

"Fight's over, target sighted," Clint reported. His throat felt dry.

_You know what to do_.

And he did know. He'd been doing this for the army for years now, this was just another job, and yet watching the Widow - seemingly the world's deadliest and most ruthless spy who killed all witnesses without batting so much as an eyelash - break down like that and then just stand there unarmed, was unheard of. Over the past four months he watched her carry out job after job for Kozakov, killing children and beheading old women to send messages to clients who owed him money. Yet this one death broke her? What the hell had Kozakov done?

After a few minutes leaning against the wall, head tipped back to catch the rain, the Widow suddenly turned and looked directly into his scope. Into his eyes. Her dark pinpoint stare seemed to look right into him, right through him, and he momentarily froze, paralyzed by surprise that he had been found out.

_Do it,_ she challenged, and he read her lips.

That, of all things, was what stopped him from taking the shot he was promised early retirement for. Instead, accounting for the rainfall and light wind, he shot through the right shoulder, pinning her like a butterfly to the alley wall so she couldn't get away. With both hands around the arrow's shaft and a grimace of pain, the Black Widow slumped over in defeat. Clint packed up his things and made his way quickly down to her. It was a good shot, of course, she was in no danger of bleeding to death; he had made sure of that.

Up close, the Black Widow was very small. At least four inches shorter than Clint, only eighty pounds soaking wet (literally), and the long wet hair plastered to her head and neck making her look like a drowned cat. She violently shivered and tried to glare as he approached, then kicked out at him as soon as he was within range.

He caught her thrashing foot and held it until she stilled. "Stop," he said in a slow, warning voice, like the one he used to use on the circus animals, "or I'll twist."

"_Poshel na khuy!_" she cursed, gasping when even that small movement wrenched the arrow.

And yeah, Clint knew that one. He smirked and slowly pushed on her foot until she started whimpering through gritted teeth. "Hold still," he told her in the same voice, and finally it seemed she had no other choice.

Panting loudly, heard even over the pounding of the rain around them, the Black Widow raised her head and flexed her hands around the arrow shaft. "_Why won't...you...kill - me?_" she choked, quietly enraged.

Clint leaned his free hand against the alley wall beside her head. "Because I'm taking you in," he replied with a smile, and yanked the arrow out of her shoulder.

The Widow screamed and hit the alley floor on her knees, rolling to get away. "_No!_" she shrieked when the attempt inevitably failed due to the pain and Clint grappled to get a hold of her. "_No! You're supposed to kill me! What are you doing? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!_"

_Barton, what the hell's taking you so long?_ Coulson irritably asked in his earpiece.

It was impossible to answer Coulson and carry the injured Widow at the same time, so he made the executive decision to ignore his handler and get the woman to safety before all the noise she was making drew attention. She was flailing with all of her limbs, even the one with a gaping hole in it, trying her damnedest to get a solid blow in. And tiny though she may have been, the Black Widow still packed a mean punch.

"_Stop - fighting - me - I'm - trying - to - help - you!_" Clint grunted. "People are staring!"

"Then _drop me_," growled the Widow savagely into his ear. Her every breath rattled with sickness that he could practically feel burning through her silky dress. "Drop me and...finish what you've started, you _coward!_"

He hitched her up a little higher in his arms. "That's what I'm doing," he determinedly replied, "finishing what I started."

The Widow's rage came in fits and surges with her fleeting strength after that. For a stretch of time she would lie curled, hot and still like a dead leaf in his arms, only to suddenly spring to life again as soon as he dropped a fraction of his guard. It didn't even seem like an attempt to dislodge his grip anymore, just to make the aborted assassination as difficult on him as possible.

Halfway back to the safe house she suddenly went limp, alarmingly so, and without thought he started to run, afraid for this woman he didn't even know beyond a list of victims longer than his arm. "Do you believe in fate, baby?" he wryly asked her unmoving face. "I dunno what else could make me into the seven-layer-dip of dumbshit like this. You'd better damn well be worth it."

She cursed at him again under her breath.

In the cluttered little hotel room he'd called home for the past months he dumped the now-delirious Widow on the bed to shiver and dry.

"I've got the Black Widow, sir," he finally reported back once he'd set a chair in front of the door and planted his ass in it.

_You killed her?_

"No. I've - I've got her _with me_, Coulson. I'm bringing her in."

_What?! Barton-!_

"I know," Clint sighed to cut him off. "But...she's real sick and I think - I think Kozakov screwed her over, and..."

He trailed off and pinched the bridge of his nose, not really sure why he'd done it at all. There had just been _something_, something in her face that he'd recognized, something to the tremor in her lips when she told him to _Do it_ that spoke volumes over the actual words said. It hadn't been an articulate chain of thought-to-action, just a gut feeling that he decided to roll with, and his gut hadn't failed him in life yet.

He heard Coulson breathe a despairing sigh. I hope you know what you're doing, Agent Barton, he said. That woman is capable of single-handedly taking down small governments, after all.

Looking at the Widow, Clint watched her scrabble weakly at the corner of the comforter with her good hand before giving up and curling into a ball, cracking open one eye to glare at him with pure hatred. "If you do not finish...this, I _will_ kill you," she whispered.

Something shuddered and gleamed behind her gaze and the truth hit Clint like a ton of bricks. She wasn't threatening him, she was _warning_ him, like a meteorologist would warn against an incoming tornado or a geologist an earthquake. Her inclination toward violence was a natural disaster, indiscriminately destroying everything in its path while the Widow was forced to stand helpless and watch. There was something bigger at play here, bigger than either of them.

"I know, sir," Clint finally replied. "I'm confident in my choice."

_... Fine. ETA four minutes._

The connection cut off and Clint got up to pack his things. Despite the clutter and bedraggled spy bleeding all over the bed, he didn't have much. "You gonna come quietly, K-19?" he asked over his shoulder while shoving piles of socks into his old army duffel.

The Widow made an angry, half-hissing and half-choking sound before wheezing a cough and moaning into the mattress.

"I'll take that as a yes," smirked Clint.

He strapped a bandage tightly onto her shoulder just before the pick-up vehicle beeped from the street below. The Widow gasped before cursing him as he picked her up again, the blood draining from her face faster than a sink with the plug pulled out. One of her loosely clenched fists came up to sock him in the jaw. It barely felt like a butterfly kiss, and he knew then that she must have been very sick. The fight with Kozakov probably took a lot out of her, and then struggling with Clint on top of it couldn't have done her any favors.

When he loaded the Black Widow, world's deadliest assassin, into the back seat of the SUV so that her head was pillowed in his lap, the agent driving yelped, "Barton, what the hell?!"

"Who broke what, and how much do I owe the hotel?" Coulson asked from the passenger seat, unfazed.

A smirk tugged up the corner of Clint's mouth before he looked down to make sure the Widow wasn't laying on her hurt shoulder. The rattling in her lungs was getting worse and her every breath came in tiny, painful gasps. "_I - hate - you_," she whispered to him.

"A new mattress, set of sheets, possibly therapy for the cleaning staff," he reported, cheerfully bouncing the knee her head was resting on. She tried and failed to scowl when the jostling made her suck in a breath and hit him again, then managed to curl herself along the seat without touching him. Still, Clint watched her shudder and jerk all the way to the launch pad.

From the moment it became clear that she wasn't about to regain her strength and make an easy escape, the Widow seemed to make it her mission to ensure Clint regretted sparing her life every second of the way to the Bratislava base. Still wet and burning up, Clint thought that the sickness had its hold on her and she wouldn't need to be restrained with Coulson's offered handcuffs, but it became almost instantly clear that the Black Widow gained her reputation of ruthlessness for a reason. When Clint pulled her out of the back seat like a rag doll she dug her nails into the tender skin on his wrist until he bled, but he refused to drop her.

Refused to let her down and, what, kill her, give her what she wanted? Was he just being a really abstract sadist by dragging this out as long as possible? The Widow was sick and injured, tap dancing across Death's welcome mat, ready to barge in with guns blazing until he interfered like an idiot and saved her, if it could even be called saving at this point. Yet he couldn't let her go now. There would be no honor in killing her now, and Clint had long since had his fill of meaningless deaths.

Still. Clint admired her guts, keeping up the fight when her goose was clearly cooked. Even when she could barely move for weakness and the rattling in her chest she did her best to try. Glared at him with hatred oozing from the depths of her poisonously green eyes. Cut him again with her finger nails. Even tried to bite him in the carotid, a fair few times, when he was carrying her and her mouth was close to his neck.

Coulson watched with a careful eye but didn't intervene. This was Clint's mission now, no matter how hopeless it might be.

"You got a name, sweetheart?" he asked once they were clear of the helipad and could hear themselves think again.

A wad of spit landed in the corner of his eye. He jostled her in his arms until she made a pained sound and lost focus for a few minutes. Maybe it was cruel and/or unusual, but it sure did make him feel better when he couldn't wipe his face.

Agents stopped and stared, aghast, along the corridors as they went to medical. "Where am I?" whispered the Widow.

"SHIELD, Bratislava."

Her eyes went wide as saucers and she screamed like she was being tortured, thrashing anew in his grip with an urgency he hadn't seen yet. Clint had to stop and finally let two other agents step in to help him prevent the Widow from hitting the tile. "Hey, hey, it's alright, Widow, it's-!"

One of the agents got an elbow in the jaw and the other a foot (missing a shoe; when had that happened?) to the groin. Her uninjured hand closed over Clint's face and disoriented him enough that she was able to slip out of his grip and onto her own feet. Not that her freedom lasted for long. As soon as Clint could see again he was crowding her into the wall with another wave of agents at his back to make sure she couldn't escape. Her legs shuddered beneath her weight and then the only things holding her up were the wall and Clint.

For a moment, despair flickered across her face. Then her expression hardened back into dignified hate. Blood had seeped through her bandages in the struggle.

"We aren't going to hurt you," he told her in the same voice he'd used in the alley. "You need a doctor, and I'm _trying_ to take you to one, a'right?"

She didn't say anything, only clenched her jaw as he took her meager weight back into his arms, grumbling in what sounded like Cantonese. When he lifted her feet off the ground, the other agents backing off, her entire face blanched in pain and he actually thought he felt her get a little hotter in his arms. He walked briskly the rest of the way to medical, because she closed her eyes and leaned against his shoulder without biting.

Agent Carter, who had been placed on base for the last legs of Clint's mission in case anything went awry, was waiting for them in the med bay. Her young eyes widened at the sight of him: fingertip-shaped bruises on his face, his arm bleeding, and a barely conscious assassin trying in vain to struggle in his arms.

"Doc," he announced in a voice dripping with disdain, unceremoniously dropping the Widow onto the nearest gurney, "I got a growth that needs removing."


End file.
